


Shotgun Bride

by Cards_Slash



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Behavior, Forced Bonding, M/M, Magic Made Them Do It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-12
Updated: 2020-05-27
Packaged: 2021-02-27 18:42:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 38,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22680418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: “You are still alive,” the Stone Witch assured him, “just like I promised.  Unfortunately, you are becoming a problem that my interests require me to address.  Now, I can’t kill you and as much as I would enjoy seeing someone else try, there are more interesting methods to control you.  And,” she slowed as she went past Bobo, let her hand drift up his shoulders, her fingers scratched across the shaved sides of his head until she found a bit of hair to pull out, “I can take care of both my problems at the same time.”“Both?” Bobo asked with a snarl.“You made a deal with the witch?” Doc shouted at him.“Pot,” Bobo said as he dipped the knife so it pointed at him, “kettle,” as it swung back toward himself.
Relationships: Doc Holliday/Bobo Del Rey | Robert Svane
Comments: 27
Kudos: 40





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> come find me on tumblr at [BewareofChris](https://bewareofchris.tumblr.com/) help me scream about this pairing. :D

Doc was thrown, not dropped, into what felt a great deal like the corner of a barn set to fall over at a second’s notice. The smell of it was all old shit and molded hay oozing through the suffocating sack that he’d woken up to find cinched tight around his neck. The wood against the backs of his shoulders, scraping at his bound hands and digging into his ass was splintered, and warped. The shock of his body hitting it made it bow out with a wail. 

“Now that’s _not_ necessary,” was the voice of the bitch herself. The sigh of the very witch that Doc had been hunting since he pulled himself out of that God-forsaken well. He could hear the click of her pointed heels and smell the unpleasant floral of her perfume. The sack shifted and pulled, and the dimness of the room around them did nothing to keep him from focusing on her tacky-pink smile. “No need to damage your prize.”

Bobo Del Rey was across the room rolling his eyes, scoffing out, “ _prize_ ,” he it was insulting to insinuate. He was holding Doc’s knife, the tip of it pressed into the thick pad of his thumb as he took stock of the spread of witchy things laid out on the thick dark cloth in the center of the room.

“Oh, I thought you’d enjoy having your fun with this one,” the Stone Witch said. “Wyatt liked him better than you, don’t you want to know why?” She curled her fingers through his hair with a smile that showed a remarkable lack of self-preservation. 

Doc was leaning up to get on his knees, fighting with the twist of metal around his wrists that was keeping him from being free. “The only fun that will be had will be by _me_ when I--”

“Yes, yes,” the Stone Witch said as she yanked his hair so hard it ripped right out of his head. “You want to kill me, but I think you’re overlooking the favor that I did you, John Henry Holliday.” She stood up and Doc moved to follow her but he was jerked back by a sudden pull at his wrists.

Across the room, Bobo was smirking over the mountain of fur he called a coat. His finger waved in the air like a reprimand. 

“You _are_ still alive,” the Stone Witch assured him, “just like I promised. _Unfortunately_ , you are becoming a problem that my interests require me to address. Now, I _can’t_ kill you and as much as I would enjoy seeing someone else try, there are more _interesting_ methods to control you. And,” she slowed as she went past Bobo, let her hand drift up his shoulders, her fingers scratched across the shaved sides of his head until she found a bit of hair to pull out, “I can take care of both my problems at the same time.” 

“Both?” Bobo asked with a snarl.

“You made a deal with the _witch_?” Doc shouted at him.

“Pot,” Bobo said as he dipped the knife so it pointed at him, “kettle,” as it swung back toward himself. 

The Stone Witch dropped the hair she’d ripped out into a shallow wood bowl filled up with the sort of nonsense that witches always seemed to have on hand. Her voice was thunderous and deep, filled up with magic that made the room dimmer and the air thicker. The ground itself was sweating the longer she talked.

Doc’s limbs were taking on a mind of their own, all his muscles felt like they were trying to tighten at the same time, starting just above his belly button and spreading out like a fire. He almost heard, over the growing scream echoing out of base of his own lungs, something that sounded a great deal like laughter laced through with a scream of pain.

\--

Doc had not fallen asleep, but he found himself waking up with a face-full of fur. His arms were tied up behind his back but he had one leg wrapped around the body curved along the front of his. 

Bobo was waking up by degrees, shifting his shoulders, filling his lungs with air as he tipped his head back with a groan that rattled in his throat. There was no urgency in how he rolled half on his back to sneer at Doc as if it were _his_ bad ideas that had brought them here. “What the fuck?” Bobo mumbled at him.

The witch was no longer in the barn with them. There was no sign that she had ever been save for a sooty black scorch mark on the floor where she had been standing, and the barn door that she had callously left open. Winter was breezing in like a drift of snow, filling up the smelly interior with a crispness that made Doc’s already numb fingers ache.

“What _exactly_ did you ask the witch to do with me?” Doc asked. He shoved his elbow to the ground so he sit up far enough to get the weight off his shoulders. 

“I didn’t ask the witch for anything,” Bobo snarled back. He pulled back like he was offended by the insinuation and he barely made it more than a stumbling couple of feet before he came to a sudden stop. 

There was a pain that a man could only describe as _hell itself_ that was tearing straight from the top of Doc’s skull to his base of his gut and it drove him _forward_ without any reason to think it would bring an end to the unholy suffering he was experiencing. But Bobo was clawing his fingers into his own head, throwing himself at Doc with exceptional speed so they ended up as close as they’d started.

“What,” Doc shouted at him, “did you do!”

“I didn’t do this,” Bobo growled. “Why the fuck would I want to do this?”

But the pain was like an echo, reverberating down his body and it robbed all his muscles of any will to work. He collapsed on the ground, gasping for breath and some reprieve from the intensity of the hurting. “Touch me,” he snapped.

“Touch you where?” Bobo snarled back. He didn’t seem to need any direction because he swung a leg across Doc’s lap and sat on him. His fingers were brutish, and overheated, pushing themselves under Doc’s clothes without so much as an invitation. But the press of his palms resting on Doc’s bare skin eased the ache. “ _F_ _uck_ ,” Bobo whispered.

“We most certainly are _not_.” He might have had the proper amount of breath to make that sound like a threat instead of weak objection if only he had any breath at all left in his body. His skin was sticky with sudden sweat, and his hands were still wrapped up in the metal Bobo had twisted around them when he’d kidnapped him out of the bar. “Untie me.”

“I don’t see how that’d improve the predicament we find ourselves in,” Bobo said. He pulled one hand out of Doc’s clothes to twist around and curl his fingers into the air. The knife he’d been toying with came flying across the room and he caught it in mid-air. “I know you, _Henry_ . Whatever you’re thinking of doing, it’s not going to end well for _me_.”

“Oh, why Bobo, I did not realize that we were looking out for one another’s best interests. I must have mistaken your intentions for delivering me to the very witch I have repeatedly indicated I wished to _kill_.”

“She’s got things I want more than you,” Bobo said. He leaned back with _care_ , testing out how far he could get before the twinge of pain started gearing up. Doc was laying flat on his trapped arms and Bobo was standing fully upright and there was a tickle of something promising to be upsetting but it was _manageable_. “This,” Bobo growled as he took a step back and that twinge became a pinch, “makes my plans much more _difficult_.”

Doc rolled himself over onto his gut, to get on his knees, to get on his feet. He was an idiot without arms, standing less than two feet from Bobo and finding it at the far edge of tolerable. “I do believe that was the witch’s intention. Untie my arms.”

Bobo’s answer was reach out and slap him as hard as he could. It hurt enough to be on the receiving end but the way the bastard howled made a convincing case that it hurt _worse_ to be on the giving end. His whole face blistered red in a moment, his eyes were blood-red and black rimmed and his voice opened up a pit that ran straight to the depths of hell. It shivered through his whole body until he clicked his teeth together with a whistle of, “that stung.”

But he unwound the wire he’d used to bind Doc, and that was really all that was important. Doc rubbed his raw wrists, thinking very seriously about punching the bastard that deserved it. (And thinking again, since recent evidence seemed to indicate that it was a bad idea.) “What _exactly_ has the witch done?”

“Why do you think I know?”

“Because you were the one that knocked me unconscious and _dragged me_ to this location, to a woman that he is _obviously_ working with. There must have been some reason that you were given when you were ordered to abduct me.”

Bobo was listening but he was also staring at Doc’s mouth. He was still holding the knife he’d pulled out of Doc’s belt, letting swish in the air like a cat’s tail. “No,” he said.

Doc closed his eyes and he reconsidered how terrible it really would be if he just hit Bobo hard enough to make himself feel better. And when he opened his eyes again, the space between them had gotten smaller. “Where’s my damn hat?” he asked.

“In the truck.” Bobo’s eyes moved without his head following along, he was staring out of the corner of his eyes at the open door. But his mouth was working up to saying something that Doc would certainly regret having to hear.

A smart man might have taken some precautions to be sure he was going to be followed, but Doc took a step toward the door with what he hoped looked like effortless carelessness. He made it one step before the throb in his head started, and another before his left eye closed on it’s own accord. His stomach was twisting up like a great fiery fist was pulling his guts out through his belly button by step three. His legs were quivering at step four. That unbearable, breath-stealing, soul-searing pain was coming on like a big ass train. 

“Fuck,” Bobo growled behind him. His footsteps were a rush of motion, thick boots on stray straw. He crashed into Doc’s back without shame. His hands were back inside of Doc’s shirt, his chin was digging into his shoulder. “This isn’t going to work,” he said.

“It’s working for me,” Doc said. He took a step forward and the great furry monster gripping his body followed right after him. He was willing to concede that it was cumbersome, and more than a little bit ridiculous but he managed to drag them both to the truck and retrieve his hat, guns and coat. 

Bobo let him go just long enough to get his coat on. He was leaning against the open car door, absently rubbing at where he’d had his hair pulled out. “How are we going to fix this?” he asked.

“Find the witch,” Doc said.

Bobo snorted at that. “I don’t think she’s going to be returning any calls, and neither one of us is in a position to be much of a threat.”

“Well, we figure out _why_ we can not be separate from one another and _then_ we find the witch.” Doc looked into the grimy interior of the vehicle that had delivered him to this fate, because at least it didn’t seem to be hiding any important secrets. “I need a drink.”

“Get in,” Bobo snarled. His hand folded over Doc’s shoulder and shoved him toward the truck as if he had enough space to lift himself onto the seat in the brief seconds Bobo gave him. He fell into the truck to the sound of the bastard chuckling to himself. Bobo was climbing in after him faster than Doc could give him the space too. He was straddling the gear shift with Bobo’s fur-covered arm laying across his thigh as the door slammed shut. “Stay there.”

Doc could have moved another foot over to sit in a less exposed space, but did not.

\--

Any bad situation was generally made worse with liberal application of alcohol but at least it became more _tolerable_. Doc was enjoying the burn of liquor warming up his gut, feeling very gracious about how Bobo was leaning against his left in the bed of his shitty truck. They were looking at the great wide nothing they’d parked on, not saying a single damn word.

The silence was better than filling the space with obvious things.

It was _obvious_ that the witch had done some witch-thing that had bound them together. It was _obvious_ that unless they figured out the witch-key to escape the witch-curse, they were going to be unpleasantly glued to one another for the foreseeable future.

Doc certainly didn’t need Bobo narrating his decision to rest his overheated hand on Doc’s thigh.

And he certainly had no intention of explaining why he’d wedged his arm behind Bobo’s back. 

No, they were just going to sit there, drinking in the quiet, working through things at their own pace.

“What if we just didn’t stop getting farther away from one another? Maybe it’s only bad when we start.” That was the sort of thing you’d expect a drunk man to say. Bobo said it first, so all Doc had to do was hum his agreement that there might be a point to the wisdom.

“And if it does not work,” Doc added, “we will have eliminated one possibility.”

“All the fires of hell are better than this,” Bobo said, mostly to his own hand resting on Doc’s thigh. He regarded it with the slow drunken glare of a man who had been betrayed by his own impaired inhibitions. (As opposed to being betrayed by a lying witch that he had knowingly gone into business with.) “What do we have to lose?”

“I believe I am going to finish this bottle first,” Doc said. Because there was a very real chance that this was one of the worst ideas they had mutually agreed upon in their short tenure of sharing ideas. 

He took his time to finish the bottle, seeing how there was no reason for a man to rush to his own hanging. When it was empty enough he couldn’t even lick the taste off the rim, he dropped it over the side of the truck. “Well, let’s try it.”

They found the flattest stretch of land their drunken little eyes could find. Bobo was unfairly sober in comparison, making demands about how they should stand back to back. All of his words had slurry sound to them, like they were getting spun around in the air before they made it to Doc’s ears. 

“On three,” Bobo said.

“Three,” Doc agreed. “Got it. We will start running at the count of three.”

“If you can even stay upright.”

“I am a very upright gentleman,” Doc said over his shoulder.

Bobo’s answer was a growl. But he counted them down: one-two-three. And as soon as he said that last one, he was kicking up dirt in a mad dash of speed in the opposite direction. Doc’s legs were slightly less accommodating to his desires, but he managed to get them started with only a minor slip on the gathering snow. 

The pain did not come on slowly. It swung at him like the fist of a mighty god, knocking him right off his feet. It consumed him like a fire, spread across every inch of his skin with heat so intense he could not _think_. There was not enough of his brain left to make sense of the shrieking vibration shaking through his whole body. All he knew was the _fire_ , and in an effort to bring some end to intolerable pain he was tearing his clothes off. The coat and the vest as he squirmed his way from his back to his belly. His knees were scraping across fresh snow and dead grass as he ripped the shirt open from the bottom to the last, resistant button at his throat. 

His hands were fistfuls of frosty white snow, rubbed across his own skin that did nothing but make the burn _worse_. In his desperation, he could not be accountable for how he was crawling across the ground in a blind attempt to close the gap they had foolishly created. 

Bobo must have had the same notion because he was wriggling his way back across the ground like a dog grinding its body into the dirt. His coat was yards away, and his own cries were deeper yowls of the same pain. 

“Stupid,” Doc gasped when he was close enough to wrap his snow-dusted hands around Bobo’s arm and drag him up against his body, “stupid fucking idea.”

Bobo was breathing too hard to give an opinion, but he collapsed back to lay on Doc’s chest like a man made of nothing but liquid parts.

\--

Doc woke up to a cold that had settled so deep into his bones it felt as if his body had been turned to lead. Bobo was grumbling next to him, rolling onto his knees so he could pull them both to their feet. “Come on,” he said. 

It would have been nice to oblige the command on his own power, but between the lingering effects of having his body set on invisible, but infernal, fire and then being slightly more frozen than any warm-blooded man could withstand, Doc did not have the energy to do anything. He was on his feet only by the virtue of Bobo’s arm holding him up. 

Bobo _was_ warm. He was as warm as banked coals. He was filling up all the space around him with a pleasant, sleepy heat. “You _could_ help,” Bobo said as he grunted with effort at having to hold Doc and pick up his own ridiculous coat. “Where the hell did you leave your coat?”

“I do not recall,” Doc mumbled. His legs were not going to hold him up and Bobo seemed to be getting more annoyed about becoming a beast of burden by the second. 

“Stand up,” Bobo growled at him.

“I am,” proved to be a lie almost as soon as the words made it out of his chattering teeth. Doc fell as soon as Bobo let go of him. He landed on his ass on the cold wet ground, and was treated to the sight of Bobo rolling his eyes. 

No, Bobo wasn’t just rolling his eyes, he was tipping his face to the sky, letting the snow fall on his apparently impervious skin, like a man praying to a God that had forsaken him. When he moved, it was with unsettling speed, dropping down into a crouch so close that his knees were split around Doc’s body. He wrapped that ugly damn fur coat around Doc, shoving his jelly-filled arms into the sleeves with careless efficiency. He was even enough of a gentleman to fasten it shut around Doc’s chest. “Warm?” Bobo asked.

“As the variety of woodland critters you must have skinned to make this ugly ass jacket,” Doc said. 

Bobo’s smile was the meanest thing he’d seen in at least an hour. The man slapped his hand onto Doc’s useless leg, curled his fingers around the thinnest part of his ankle and stood up. The force of it threw Doc back so that he was being dragged along the slick ground like a sack of molded potatoes.

His present situation could have been better, but at least it was significantly warmer than it had when it started. 

\--

“What,” Doc grumbled at the growing stink of an unpleasant smoky variety, “the _hell_ are you smoking?” He pried his eyes open to find that he was half-laying across the bench seat of the truck, with his knees tucked up so high they were kissing his ribs. One of his arms had been pinned under his body in a most unpleasant manner and the other was hanging off the side of the seat. The top of his head was wedged against Bobo Del Rey’s considerably sized thigh. 

And he was still wearing the coat that smelled like brimstone and bad cologne. 

“The piece of shit cigarettes that I found in the glove compartment,” Bobo said as if _he_ had been the victim in this situation. “This is number seven.” He held it up between his fingers like a prize. 

Doc pushed himself to sitting up at the very same moment Bobo dragged him across the seat by the waistband so they did not make it more than a few inches away from one another. “Refrain from grabbing me,” Doc snapped at him.

“How do you think I got you in the fucking truck,” Bobo asked. He tossed his half-smoked cigarette out the window and turned the fullness of his belligerent attention on Doc. “Can you _walk_ now?”

Doc’s answer was a sneer because he did have some gaps in his memory as to how he had gone from being dragged across the ground to seated in the truck in front of the least attractive hotel in Purgatory. “Has my vacancy at the trailer park been filled?”

“You want to explain why I’m dragging your unconscious ass into an RV while you’re wearing my coat? I don’t think _Wynonna_ would be very forgiving about the sort of thing she’d hear from my boys about _that_.”

Right. Doc looked down at the mountain of fur he was still wearing. His fingers felt fat still but they worked the fastenings free so he could shrug it off. “You think she won’t hear about you taking me into this _fine_ establishment?”

“Maybe. But not from my guys.” He pulled the keys out of the ignition and pointed at the floorboard of the passenger side. Doc’s hat and coat was in a rumpled mess, left damp and mud-streaked where they landed. 

“That is not how you treat a man’s belongings.” He ducked to the side far enough to grab his things as the door to the truck squealed open behind him. Bobo barely gave him enough time to get his hands on his hat and coat before he was being dragged out by the pocket. “I said,” he snarled as he kicked Bobo in his still-naked chest, “do not…” 

Whatever else Doc had intended to say was lost in a sudden shock of agony blossoming out in his own chest. It was worse than any man’s effort to kick him in the chest had ever been. It was a whole stampede of boots, one after another, kicking him in the ribs until it made his vision go full of spots. And he was gagging for breath as he was unceremoniously dragged out of the truck.

“Bad idea, Henry,” Bobo whispered into his face. He was looming in a small space, leaning them both into the truck so he could get his coat. There wasn’t even a mark on his skin, and Doc was walking half-bent over because it felt like his chest was half-caved in.

The clerk stationed in the outdated office looked unimpressed to find himself looking at two grown men in states of undress. In fact, he barely mustered the interest in their presence to allow them to pay for a room and hand over the key.

Doc was still rubbing the sore spot on his chest when Bobo pushed the motel door open. The room was garishly decorated. It had the smell of diluted cleaners and the look of having been left sit for too long without use. But the door closed, and the inside was warm enough to be comfortable. 

“Don’t pass out until I find the remote for the TV,” Bobo said. He threw his coat on the chair in the corner and grabbed Doc by the front of the shirt to pull him deeper into the room. 

“I can walk,” Doc hissed at him.

“Can you?” Bobo snapped back. He turned on every light in the room, pulled open all the drawers and flipped the blankets back off the bed so far they landed on the ground. No matter where he looked or how much impatience he employed, a television remote did not appear. 

Doc scratched the dirt caked on his chest with a sidelong glance toward the bathroom and the hope of finding a decent shower therein. 

“As exciting as seeing you naked would be for me,” Bobo said with his hand pressed to his own chest, “personally. I am not taking a shower with you.”

“You do not need to be in the shower with me,” Doc said.

“Not,” Bobo hissed at him, easing that limited space between them into something unpleasant, “happening.” He flopped back to sit on the end of the bed and pulled his own boots off to throw to the side. “I assume you’re going to lose consciousness at any second.”

The fact that Doc was tired did not indicate that he was going to be knocked unconscious by an unearthly amount of pain no doubt brought about by a witch’s curse. He turned so his back was to Bobo’s obnoxiously pleased face. It was a poor excuse for privacy but it gave him enough momentary peace to look at what remained of his shirt. Half the buttons had been torn off and there was no hope of getting it to stay closed. It made as much sense to undo the button at his throat as it did to button the only two remaining buttons at the bottom. His vest was balled up in his coat sleeve, and that _at least_ still had working buttons. He eased the shirt off his shoulders and threw it toward the chair. 

“Well if you think it’s that kind of curse, _Henry_ ,” Bobo said. His voice was snake like, every word a lick of a promise that did not exist between them. His fingernails raked down Doc’s spine

It wasn’t fair that he couldn’t _punch_ the bastard right in his stupid face. “ _John Henry_ , or Doc would suffice.” He pulled the vest out to slide his arms into it and buttoned it into place. “I do have some personal matters I need to attend to,” he said with a nod toward the bathroom, “we should be able to manage to part the distance between the commode and the door.”

Bobo rolled his eyes, “why’d you come back so _human_?”

They managed the awkwardness of bathroom activities and sharing the limited space on the bed without having to say a single word. Bobo was a human-shaped coal fire that Doc couldn’t escape but as tired as he was, he wasn’t even inclined to try. The heat was like a lullaby, and it sang him right to sleep.

\--

A man should be forgiven for any assumptions he made in his sleep. And Doc’s body had made a great deal of assumptions without his waking mind’s consent. A century stuck down a damp well left a man in constant need of _warmth_ and there just so happened to be a rather comfortable source of it that could not escape grabbing distance. 

The main point being that when Doc’s grip tightened around the pleasant heat of another body he was not aware that his arms _and_ legs were wrapped around the belligerent corpse of one Bobo Del Rey. If he had known, he might not have wriggled his fingers into the enticingly heated space between the man’s back and the bed beneath him. 

He most certainly would not have hazarded a rock of his body against the one so pliantly lying with his. 

“For the last time,” Doc all-but-shouted, a full twenty minutes after he’d unceremoniously shoved backwards as a good morning greeting, “I _was_ asleep.”

Bobo scoffed again. He was wearing his road-kill coat like armor, half in and half-out of the door they had not mutually agreed to open. “I’ve seen plenty of sleeping men in my life. Hell, I spent most of yesterday watching you sleep. And not once during all that time did a single one of those sleeping men start humping me.”

“I was _not_ ,” Doc had half a man to drag Bobo back into the room just so they could continue this ludicrous conversation away from anyone that might be forced to overhear it. 

“I know a cock when I feel one.”

That certainly said more about Bobo’s social life than Doc wanted to hear. He was daydreaming of violence, thinking very seriously about putting the knife in his belt to use. The odds weren’t in his favor that he’d survive the attempt but just then, on their sixth revolution of this same _stupid_ conversation he didn’t care very much about those particulars. 

“A man cannot control his natural state while he is _sleeping_ ,” Doc said through his teeth. They were grinding so tightly together he almost thought he could hear them _breaking_. 

Bobo was spinning in a circle to crowd him back against the door jamb, taking advantage of the imagined bulk his coat gave him to make a man feel small. His voice was as soft as a lover’s, whispering, “bullshit.”

Louder than that, was the distinct sound of a gun being drawn. Doc had many talents that had allowed him to live such a fulfilling and successful life, but what he did _not_ have was one single ounce of luck. Knowing, as he did, that fate hated him, he did not even need to lean out of the magnificent shadow of Bobo’s coat to know that they had been found in a compromising position by none other than Deputy Marshal Dolls.

“Well, shit,” he said.

Bobo looked over his shoulder with a smirk that did not accurately describe the situation at hand. His fingers had found their way into a resting place on Doc’s hip that was not reserved for this man. “Do you mind,” Bobo said.

“I don’t mind at all,” Dolls said with a very malicious grin and a well-aimed gun. “But you’re both going to have to come with me.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks to stardust_andwine/song_of_fate without whom these fics would not exist.

A man should be able to have a _private_ conversation. 

There were any number of things about this cage he found himself trapped in that _pissed_ him off, but few of them were as capable of getting under his skin as the arrogance of the humans that populated it. Purgatory was full of potential victims, absolutely overflowing with people that had _no_ idea how desperately incapable of protecting themselves they really were. All that stood between them and _constant_ , intolerable agony was the fact that turning this stupid, exhausting town into a hellhole would have made Bobo’s already difficult situation considerably more difficult.

But, now and again, faced with the arrogance of a lawman with a single gun and no idea what he was getting himself into, Bobo just _wanted_ to educate the whole fucking lot of them about what _hell_ really was. 

“This is _not_ what it may seem to be,” sounded very much John Henry Holliday starting to tell another not-quite-accurate story. He was moving forward, crowding past Bobo’s body just so he wasn’t pushed against a doorway. There was no hope of convincing anyone that mattered things weren’t exactly what they looked like.

Not standing outside this hotel. Not when Henry was wearing nothing but a vest. Not when they couldn’t be more than an arm’s length away from one another.

Bobo looped his arm over Henry’s shoulders, pushed his palm against the man’s face to turn it to look at him. He was smirking because even if he couldn’t deflect bullets with a wave of the hand, there was no way Holliday was going to get shot by _this_ man. “Don’t be shy, _pumpkin_.”

Deputy Marshall Dolls couldn’t take a joke on a good day, but the sound of his voice in a growl, breathing out something like, “I _knew_ it,” really indicated a startling lack of imagination.

Henry wasn’t even looking at the man with a gun pointed at him, he was staring at Bobo with an edge of violence like the taste of blood in his mouth. His hands were twitching to draw his weapons, as he said, “I will shoot you,” as if that were even _possible_ right now.

Dolls had one set of handcuffs and no backup, so he must have been relying on his own sense of righteousness to get them from where they were standing to the station. He did stand there with the gun pointed at Henry (wasn’t that interesting, all that hate he had for the man) and the cuffs hanging off his other hand like he was trying to figure out how this was going to work. “Are you going to come quietly…”

“I prefer not to,” Bobo said.

“...or should I call for back up?”

“Shut up,” Holliday snarled at him. He put his hands up, but not because he was outnumbered in the slightest. No, Henry was a survivor first, and his best chance at surviving this particular incident required him to be the one that did the telling of the story. 

Bobo rolled his eyes as he let his arm drop off Holliday’s shoulders. “Apparently we’re surrendering.” He did not, however, put his hands up and that must have been why Dolls put the handcuffs on Holliday with far more violence than was necessary. 

In fact, it didn’t seem to matter that Bobo was there at all. Henry ended up shoved face-first into the vehicle with the handcuffs clipped so tightly on his wrists it was making _Bobo’s_ wrists sting. Dolls’ was all but laying against his back, getting off the notion of momentary superiority. It would have been a hell of a show to watch if Bobo wasn’t obligated to lean back against the truck right next to them.

“Did you need a moment?” he asked, since he was there.

Henry’s hat slid off the back of his head from how hard his face was pushed against the window, but he _still_ managed to roll his eyes. Dolls was all fury, but he did _not_ object. Instead he yanked Henry back a step just so he could pull open the door and shove him inside. 

“Get in the damn truck.”

“Get my hat,” Henry said from face-down on the backseat. He was wriggling himself up to sitting like a fish caught on land, trying to shake the hair out of his face. 

Dolls face was all murder and disgust, as pointed and unpleasant as the barrel of the gun he pointed at Bobo again. 

That stinging ache of being just a hair too far from Henry started in spaces between Bobo’s ribs, but it wasn’t so bad he couldn’t slap a smirk on his face as he ducked low enough to grab the hat. “Gotta keep the wife happy,” he said.

“I will shoot you,” Dolls said.

Of course he would. Bobo winked at him but he got into the damn truck anyway.

\--

As far as Bobo was concerned, there was nothing _not_ funny about the situation he found himself in. There was an utter ridiculousness to being bound to Doc Holliday against his will. Finding it _funny_ had kept him from throwing them both over a cliff. It had given him something to do while he waited for Henry to wake up from any of his innumerous naps of the day before. 

The witch was going to have to be dealt with, but apparently they were all going to suffer through the charade of outrage. Apparently, Henry was going to surrender them both to the authorities and follow after a man they could have killed in their sleep. Apparently they were nothing more than a pair of obedient lapdogs, being dragged through a police station that was woefully incapable of holding them.

Henry didn’t do anything but stand there with a clenched jaw and a look of _boredom_ as Dolls stripped his holster off his hips. He didn’t say a God damn word as he was pushed into the jail cell. He didn’t so much as manage a worthwhile comeback as the jail bars closed. 

The only problem with Henry inside of a jail cell was that Bobo was on the outside of it. It was manageable when he was leaning against the bars, but it didn’t seem like that was going to last. 

“You, come with me,” Dolls said.

“No,” Bobo said. 

Dolls was all _outrage_. Even that was funny. A few decades in hell and a century or so watching humans go through all these _pathetic_ , momentary things had made almost every single one of them as transparent as glass. Dolls was _furious_ because John Henry Holliday was a magnet for any Earp that ever lived. If Wyatt hadn’t stood a chance at resisting then Wynonna sure as hell did not.

There was the gun again, pointed at him like they weren’t civilized men. “I wasn’t asking.”

“What _exactly_ ,” Bobo asked as he slid his arm through the bars. Henry was being a dick, standing in the middle of the cell, gritting his teeth like he enjoyed that ticklish sensation of hell fire filling up their chests. “Are you arresting me for? I don’t remember you mentioning when you invited us.”

Dolls looked at Holliday and then back at Bobo, “I’m arresting you for suspicion of consorting with a known criminal.”

The twist of fire growling in his gut was crawling up his chest like heartburn, filling up his throat with heat that was making this situation less tolerable by the moment. But he was willing to play along since he couldn’t _leave_. “Which one of us is the criminal?”

Henry cleared his throat from inside the cell, just so Bobo would look at him, and as soon as he was sure he was being watched, he took a _very_ purposeful step _back_. It was like being hit in the face with a baseball bat. The pain hit them at the same moment, so Henry was half-bent and gasping through his teeth. 

“Asshole,” Bobo snarled at him. He coiled his fingers toward his palm, pulling at all those locking bits on the cell door. They wrenched loose in a way that did not sound like they could be put right again, but it didn’t matter when the door popped open. Bobo slid through the narrow opening to close the space between Henry and himself. 

Dolls was staring at them with open-mouthed shock. “What the _hell_?”

“We got cursed by the _witch_ ,” Henry hissed through his clenched teeth. His wrists were a bloody mess because his arms were straining to be free. It served the bastard right for being an asshole about everything. His skin was coated in a fine sweat when Bobo’s hands pushed under his vest to find _skin_.

The ache settled to an echo, it faded like a sigh, and the two of them were standing there like idiots, in a jail cell, panting for breath.

Dolls grabbed the door and pulled it shut. The lock knocked back into place but it wasn’t _secure_ and all three of them knew it. They’d been working under a pretense this whole time, and that must have been enough for Dolls because he took a step back. “Right,” he was nodding, “right if _that’s_ what we’re calling it.”

“God damn it,” Henry snapped at last, “we’re not _calling_ anything but what it is.”

Dolls didn’t care. He didn’t even bother to come up with an answer. He just opened the door and left. 

Henry was glaring at him as soon as the door opened, as if it had been _Bobo_ ’s idea to go along with this. As if _Bobo_ had just given up. As if _Bobo_ had consented to being handcuffed, and manhandled and jailed. As if _Bobo_ had been the little bitch that put a step too much space between them. “You could remove these restraints,” Holliday said.

Bobo dropped onto the concrete bed at the back of the cell. “ _You_ could have not let him put them on. _I_ can’t interfere with the _law_.”

Henry’s options were limited by the amount of space he could put between them. He was still grinding his teeth, sneering at the wall because it cared more than Bobo did. He kept standing and Bobo slouched into a lean that let his legs be close enough to Holliday’s to count as closeness.

\--

The wait was, at very least, brief. 

Wynonna burst through the door like a wild animal. Whatever Deputy Marshall Dolls had relayed to her as the _truth_ must have been like a kick to the balls, because she didn’t even waste a half-breath on pretense before Peacemaker was pointed right at Bobo’s head.

(It might have been nice, for _once_ , to be given the benefit of the doubt. He _definitely_ had not asked the witch to bind him to John Henry Holliday. That had been Constance’s idea of a sick joke, no doubt. It must have tickled her as pink as a peach.) 

“What the _fuck_ did you to do Doc?” Wynonna snarled at him. She cocked Peacemaker like she wasn’t even going to give him a moment to compose an answer. The barrel was already glowing like a fire.

Dolls had been a hell of a joke, but Wynonna was going to shoot first. Bobo lurched up from the lazy slouch because a man needed to have a sense of self-preservation. Peacemaker was harder to manipulate than your average sort of metal, but he’d done it more than once in the past. 

Only, Henry slid in front of him before he could even get his hand up. His voice was as soft as flower petals, like a man talking to a skittish horse, he was saying, “ _Wynonna,_ I do not know how the facts were relayed to you but, neither Bobo nor myself are responsible for our present predicament.” 

Wynonna scoffed at that, as mad as a woman betrayed, still glaring at Bobo like he was the one telling lies. “Right, so you weren’t seen coming out of a motel room with _Bobo_ all over you?”

Dolls was certainly more bitchy than even Bobo would have assumed he could be. He must have been dying to relay his incomplete facts. He must have told one hell of a story about all the things he’d thought he’d seen. 

Still, Bobo was watching the backs of Henry’s shoulders, how they tensed up with annoyance. “The _witch_ has cursed us so that we cannot be farther apart from one another than you see us now.”

“And did she curse you to lose your shirt?” Wynonna asked. “Did she curse you to just stand there and let Bobo put his hands all over you? _Dolls_ saw you stand there and let him…” she stuttered on that, working over how she wanted to say it, “ _feel_ you up?”

“All of this can be explained,” Henry said in a very convincing manner. “If you would just remove these restraints and allow me to...”

“Move,” Wynonna said. She motioned to the right with Peacemaker. “I can take care of your curse, Doc. No Bobo, no curse, no problems.”

There was more than one problem with that logic. Bobo slid to his feet behind Holliday, looped his arms around his chest and pulled him back so they were pressed together all front to back. (Wasn’t it funny how there was a breath of relief that shivered through both of them?) “One problem,” Bobo growled from over Henry’s furious shoulder, “you kill me? You kill him.”

Henry was _withstanding_ him. He was toes to top _tolerating_ being gripped. It made him as comfortable to hold as a steel post. But he was summoning the patience to say, “ _Unfortunately_ , that appears to be true.”

Wynonna wavered, she _deliberated_ , and then she dropped the gun to her side. She looked at them with all the same disgust that had kept Dolls’ smile just one shade past acceptable. Only, it was _personal_ for her. This disgust was the start of a terrible _doubt_. “Right,” she said, mostly to herself, “if it’s a curse, there’s a way to break it. So we get you two a magic divorce and then,” she said this part with absolutely _glee_ , “I shoot you.”

“I think you’re forgetting something important,” Bobo said.

“Am I?” Wynonna snapped.

“You don’t know what kind of curse it is, you don’t have the witch and well--I _have_ Henry here. Just think about all the _things_ I can do to him. And getting sent back to hell at the end isn’t exactly an incentive for me to _play nice_ is it?”

Bobo’s fingers dug into Henry’s chest and it echoed through his own like bullets breaking through his flesh. He’d felt _worse_ , and he had nothing to _lose_. His chest dipped forward to push Henry’s body until he was bent at the waist. (It served him right, getting them into this stupid situation to start with.)

“Stop,” Henry hissed at him.

Wynonna was helpless and _furious_. “What do you _want_ , Bobo?”

“I want _out_ ,” Bobo said.

Henry interrupted the moment by jerking his head back and smacking it into Bobo’s. The crack of bone was nothing compared to the sharp howl of pain Holliday let out. It must have been one hell of a sudden headache because his knees gave out and Bobo’s only choice was to go down with him or drop him. Human shields were useless on the floor.

“What the fuck?” Wynonna grabbed the bars of the cell door and it slapped against the frame and popped open again. “What did you do?” she was shouting at Bobo.

Henry was on his knees, folded over with his face to the floor, breathing like crying. But he still managed to gasp, “we can’t hurt one another,” because he _obviously_ did not understand the importance of a well-kept secret. But he managed to get himself upright on his knees again, sagging under the echoes of the pain he’d inflicted on himself. “But I would also like to be released from this cell and these restraints.”

Wynonna was looking at Bobo like she was fantasizing about shooting him until he was swiss cheese. But she stepped back and pulled the door open with her. “You’re not leaving the station until we’ve got answers.”

Bobo got to his feet first and he dragged Holliday up to his (much like he’d spent the whole day yesterday doing). “Excellent,” he said as he pushed Henry through the open door first, “I think the first question I’ll ask is why I was arrested without cause.”

\--

Another thing about humans was how easily they accepted _degrees_ of safety. Bobo was no less a threat, leaning back in a desk chair, half-hidden behind John Henry Holliday than he was any other time. Holliday’s body between him and all the ridiculous stares he was getting did not limit his abilities in anyway.

But everyone, from Dolls to Wynonna to Waverly was relaxing under the _idea_ that they had a shield between them and him. Henry was doing nothing at all to protect them, he didn’t have so much as a belt buckle to use as a weapon. He wasn’t even looking at them; he was dabbing at the raw wounds left on his wrists. He was soaking up blood with pinched up paper napkins, hissing under his breath where it hurt the worst.

“Alright,” Waverly said from across the room. She was hiding behind a desk, flanked on both sides by people with guns, like she _required_ that sort of protection. “So, what _exactly_ did the witch do? What did she say? Do you remember any of the words?”

Henry was _cranky_ , frowning at the blood stains on the cuffs of his coat. “She pulled out my hair,” he said and like he’d only just remembered it, “where’s my damn hat?”

“Your hair?” Waverly repeated, “you can’t _give_ a witch your _hair!_ ”

“Yeah, duh,” Wynonna added, “everyone knows that.”

Bobo snorted, but Henry’s whole body went tight. He was _trying_ because his survival depended on making them believe that he was a victim. Now, Bobo had not know the man as _personally_ in life as others might have but he knew him enough, and he knew more than _enough_ about the sort of person he was. John Henry Holliday was not a _victim_ even when his survival depended on it. 

Still, he said, “I did not _give_ it to her. I was _restrained_ at the time.”

Bobo could feel them all looking at him, drawing all the right conclusions about how Henry had come to be tied up to start with. “She had a pentagram,” he said since they were all staring at him.

“A witch with a pentagram,” Dolls repeated. “Can you tell us anything that’s _actually_ helpful?”

“He’s not going to help,” Waverly said, “why would he help? As long as he’s bound to Doc he’s got everything he wants.”

That _was_ true to a certain extent. Bobo had something he wanted. He had a damn good shield against those bullets that Wynonna was itching to use on him. What he didn’t have was _freedom_. Still, he leaned forward far enough to slap Henry on the ass, like a dirty punctuation point to Waverly’s insinuation. Bobo had prepared himself for unpleasantness; he was already gritting his teeth against the certainty of some matching pain on his own body. 

Only Henry startled at the touch, and a pleasant glowing heat spread through Bobo’s body. 

“Oh,” he breathed, “now that’s interesting.”

“If you do that again, I will cut off your hand,” Henry hissed at him.

Somehow, Bobo didn’t believe that for a moment. He leaned back into his chair, letting the truth they both knew spread into his grinning mouth. Maybe he had more than one thing he wanted, maybe he also had a glimpse into the inner workings of John Henry Holliday and he was going to _exploit_ the hell out of it.

“Can you not?” Wynonna snapped from across the room.

“I don’t think he can,” Dolls answered.

“Guys!” Waverly was _distressed_. “Can we concentrate? Do you remember any of the words? Do you remember if there were candles? Animal bones? Any smells you recognized?”

“Unfortunately,” Henry said, “I was distracted by the sensation of being eviscerated and I was not able to _hear_ most of the witch’s words.”

“Nothing?” 

“Maybe if Henry, here, hadn’t been so intent on killing her…” Bobo lifted his feet to rest them on the top of the desk and his legs were brushing up against Henry’s so the man either had to stand there and let it happen or shift to put space between them. 

“Shut up, Bobo,” Wynonna snapped.

“Do you know how many curses there are?” Waverly demanded, “ _hair_ is a base ingredient! And,” she motioned at them with fresh anger, “this doesn’t tell us anything! We don’t know what she _wants_ out of this. We don’t know what she _intended_ to happen. This could just wear off on it’s own. This could be a...a...love curse, a binding, a...a _sex_ curse!”

Now that would be interesting.

“It is _not_ ,” Henry was saying in time with Wynonna across the room:

“Gross!”

And Dolls had the look of a man who was just waiting for someone to realize he had been right from the start. “Alright,” he said before the room could erupt into chaos, “we can’t get ahead of ourselves. Like you said, we don’t know what the witch wanted so we have to assume that anything is possible. We start researching and we _observe_. Curses get worse, whatever this is, we might be able to figure it out by watching what it does.”

“If you’re into watching, Xavier, all you had to do was ask.” Bobo winked at him.

“Shut your mouth,” said the man with no humor, “or I’ll put you in a plastic box.”

Henry was half-turned and looking at him with a shake of his head. “If you could refrain from antagonizing our _allies_.”

Bobo dropped his feet back to the floor so he could rock out of the chair and up to standing. He was close enough to Holliday they were sharing a single puff of breath. “ _Your_ allies,” he said. And then, “I need breakfast.”

“You can’t leave,” Wynonna said.

Bobo could, in fact, do whatever the hell he wanted. He grabbed Henry by the coat sleeve and pulled him toward the open door. Henry didn’t go quietly, he was twisting and pulling to be left behind. “We’ll come back,” Bobo promised.

Henry didn’t give in until Bobo picked up his hat from the file cabinet by the door. He might not even have given in at that moment, he was just taking a good plan and making it his own. He did lean back to assure the humans they were leaving behind, “I will see to it that both of us return.”

\--

This establishment was not his _preferred_ breakfast spot but the one he would have rather gone to had a higher number of revenants. Bobo was willing to play along with whatever Wynonna needed to prove to herself Henry was an unwilling participant but he wasn’t feeling up to dealing with having to protect Holliday from hellspawn with IQs in the single digits. 

It didn’t appear to matter where they went for breakfast, Henry sat opposite him in the booth with two hands wrapped around his coffee mug and the _sourest_ look of hatred making his face as ugly as possible. He’d left his coat in the truck since it was (as he put it) beyond repair. 

“We’re going to need to find you a shirt,” Bobo said. Not because he _personally_ cared about the long stares the bright-red-damage to Henry’s wrists was getting. There wasn’t a patron or employee in this diner that hadn’t already decided Henry was a victim of Bobo’s demonic sex practices anyway. 

Henry looked up at him with no less hatred than he’d been directing at his coffee. “Is this _amusing_ for you?”

It was amusing _enough_ for him. Bobo was leaning back against the booth, resting his elbows over the top. They were both pushing their feet into each other’s spaces, keeping the curse to a manageable buzz with the technicality of a touch. “I’ve had worse days.”

“We cannot _hunt_ the _witch_ if we cannot _cooperate_.” Henry was explaining obvious ideas. “If you had kept your mouth shut, I could have defused the situation at the police station.”

A waitress with a soft spot for abused types arrived with a plate full of waffles that had _definitely_ been spit on. She dropped it in front of Bobo with no attempt at kindness, and slid the second plate full of meat, eggs and potatoes just far enough onto the table to say she didn't intentionally throw it on the floor. She didn’t even look at Bobo, but turned her attention to Henry, “are you sure I can’t get you something besides that coffee, darling?”

“No thank you,” Henry said with a charming smile.

Bobo rolled his eyes and pulled the plate of eggs away from the edge of the table. He pushed the waffles toward Henry to make space for the one he’d rather eat. “I’ve got eyes,” Bobo said, “maybe if you hadn’t _fucked_ Wynonna, maybe if _Deputy Marshall Dolls_ didn’t _want_ to fuck Wynonna, you could have _defused_ the situation. But,” he plucked the hot sauce out of the caddy up against the window and screwed loose the cap, “you did, and he does, and you can’t defuse shit. So, eat the fucking waffles, _Henry_ , and we can talk about what we’re going to do.”

Henry was a spiteful shit, leaning back into the seat, starving himself just to prove he could.

(Maybe the witch had a point, somewhere in all that rambling she had done. About how she was solving both her problems with one curse. Because Bobo was willing to be sent back to hell if he got the chance to choke the smugness out of John Henry Holliday with his bare hands.)

\--

“Where,” was the sound of Henry’s constant whining dragging his feet just behind him, “are _you_ going?”

As far as Bobo was concerned, he could go anywhere and do anything he wanted. He had offered the only olive branch he was willing to extend and Holliday had sat opposite him with his jaw clenched and his arms crossed. Breakfast had been meant to be a _relaxing_ interruption of an otherwise outstandingly shitty twenty-four hours. 

Somewhere, a witch who couldn’t stand being told _no_ was doubtlessly robbing him of the bones he had spent _years_ digging up. As soon as she had her greedy mitts on them, she wouldn’t be able to wait a second longer than necessary before she tried bringing her precious sons back. The only thing saving this hellhole from the reality of Constance Clootie’s demonic offspring was the fact that Bobo hadn’t been stupid enough to put all the bones in the same place.

He might even have _shared_ that with Henry, if there had been even the vaguest sense of equality. But Henry had crawled up Wynonna Earp’s ass the way he’d crawled up Wyatt’s and that gave a man ideas about how he was too _good_ to work with just _anyone_. 

“Oh, we are going to be _silent_ partners now?” Henry asked, “where was this reserve when you were instigating the Earp sisters?”

A man had a right to find humor where it was available. Bobo stopped in front of the closest store that sold cheap (tourist) T-shirts and medical supplies. He didn’t say a word to the bitchy man he couldn’t get away from but pull the door open and sweep an arm to indicate Henry could go first.

Henry did not move. Bobo could not have stopped the growl that was rumbling through his throat even if he had wanted to. He rolled his eyes and went through the door, it slapped shut behind him and put a half-breath too much space between them. He could have stopped when that aching started in his thighs, but he kept walking until the mark on his back set itself on fire, and the heat spread through all his veins. 

He must have been a sight, growling like a feral animal, shivering so hard even the fur on the coat was vibrating with his eyes turning red-and black rimmed. The bell on the door squealed as Henry came charging into the store, cursing his name like it wasn’t his own damn fault. He closed the space between them with a slide of his boots across the concrete flooring. 

Henry’s hand was sweat-damp and desperate, wrapping around Bobo’s.

“You do not need to be a _bitch_ ,” Henry said.

Bobo snorted, “I’m not the only one being a _bitch_.” 

But since Holliday was so willing, he pulled him back to the display of God-awful tourist merchandise tucked into the dusty corner. They were shirts made of the sort of colors that even the eighties would be embarrassed to wear. They were covered in faded slogans (Welcome to Purgatory! You’ll never want to leave!) but they were something that wasn’t just a _vest_. 

Henry managed to extricate himself from his own ass long enough to pick one he was willing to wear. 

The tired old woman at the checkout didn’t so much as look up from the register as she rang up the collection of first aid items. If she took any note of them at all it was only long enough to be sure the money she was given wasn’t counterfeit. 

That was what the humans that lived in Purgatory were meant to be like, absolutely indifferent to the unusual. 

\--

“Oh good, you stopped for groceries.” Dolls was a man not meant to make a joke. He must have been going for some sort of dark humor in that droll and toneless voice of his, but it didn’t seem to earn so much as a snort’s worth of appreciation from his audience.

“ _What_ are you wearing?” Wynonna asked. She was sitting on the edge of one of the desks with frosting streaks on the knees of her jeans and the sort of boredom on her face you didn’t usually see out of high school. 

Henry was wearing the only shirt from the store that was not tie-dye or orange, a nice pink that might have been aiming for Pepto-Bismal but managed a milky pencil eraser. It had the faded outline of Wyatt’s face and the word PURGATORY in an arch across the top. The bottom declared it the home of the Earps and it was at least one size too large for him. But it was a shirt, and it had sleeves, and that made it an improvement over the cowbody-turned-stripper look they had started with. 

“Oh,” Waverly said when she looked up, “I don’t like that one. Where’d you go?”

“That store on Birch street,” Wynonna said.

“Does that matter?” Dolls asked.

Bobo was being _gifted_ with a vision of the inner workings of the people that were planning on stopping him from leaving the triangle. He was standing in their headquarters, listening to what passed for a planning meeting, thinking how he would have been happier if he’d never gotten the chance to see behind the curtain. But he was here, like he’d said he would be, with Henry and his freshly bandaged wrists.

“Tell them what you found,” Wynonna said.

Waverly’s smile was all nerves. She stood up behind the desk, looking no less like a twelve year old girl skipping school, with her fingers in knots in front of her. Her voice was as unsure as the smile on her face, but she made it _sound_ like a good thing when she said, “so we found some ways we might be able to break the curse.”


	3. Chapter 3

Doc was not intimidated by a degree of danger. He had been a professional gambler and a gunslinger and neither profession could be done without accepting that you were never entirely safe. You had to be able to read the faces of the people you were planning on trusting, and weigh out if the danger they were wrong was greater or worse the consequence of refusing their help.

Wyatt had had an honest man’s face but there was hell to pay if you didn’t have a damn good reason to turn him down when he came asking for favors.

Waverly Earp was smiling at him with a pinch between her eyebrows and _no confidence_ in what she was saying. They were still working off an unfortunate first impression and the fact that she’d already found him _consorting_ with this particular enemy once before. Wynonna might have hated Bobo on _principle_ and for good reason, but Waverly had been _hurt_ by Bobo and it showed on her face.

It echoed across the room to the man himself, sitting himself on the corner of the desk like it was a lounge chair. Bobo’s body was a study of defensive language, a constant argument against the charges being thrown at him. Whatever he’d done to make Waverly hate him, he had _reasons_ he thought were good enough to justify the outcome. 

Doc was stuck between two impossible places, trapped in a two foot square of the man everyone hated and the stretched smile of the little girl who could make Wynonna Earp believe _anything_. “Well,” he said. He shrugged his vest back on, over the almost offensive attempt to honor Wyatt Earp’s face, “that _is_ good news. What do we need to accomplish such a goal?”

Waverly looked at the book, “well,” was stretched as far as it could go without breaking, “it’s either _graveyard_ dirt or _church_ dirt, so I _thought_ , we could get both at the same place but the thing is you have to…” She trailed off for a second, staring mostly at Bobo and his obnoxious disinterest in everything she was saying, “rub it all over your bodies.”

“Well that sounds refreshing,” Doc said, “where should we go to find this magic dirt?”

“ _You’re_ not going,” Dolls said, “both of you are going to stay here. If you want our help, if you want access to our _research_ about how to break this curse, both of you are going to stay here.”

Bobo was laughing behind him, each chuckle like a popping bubble. The tip of his boot kicked against the back of Doc’s leg, like an echo of how he’d sat across the breakfast table. “I think he likes you,” Bobo said so quietly it was barely loud enough to be heard.

“Relax,” Wynonna said. “I know the place, I’ll get the dirt. After all,” she pushed herself off the desk she’d been sitting on to land on her feet. “What girl doesn’t _love_ digging up graveyard dirt early in the morning?” 

“I’ll text you the address,” Waverly said, “and while she’s gone...I guess, we need to find some tubs.”

“Tubs?” Bobo repeated.

Waverly did not even acknowledge him. She looked down at the book spread open on the desk in front of her and then at the sizable space between the desks. “And, maybe a shower curtain? It’s going to get _muddy_.” 

“I’ve got a tarp,” Dolls said. Because he was precisely the sort of man that would have a tarp laying around when one was needed.

“Oh,” Waverly added, like she very much did not want to, “also, you’re going to have to…” her hands motioned down Doc’s body from his shoulders to somewhere around his waist band before she looked back at his face with an apologetic shrug. “Hopefully you’re wearing underwear--did you wear underwear in the Old West? I don’t know what underwear was like back then.”

“Why?” Bobo asked with far more force than was necessary.

“Don’t talk to her,” Dolls snapped back.

“How am I supposed to do what she says if I can’t ask questions?” Bobo asked.

That was the start of an argument that Doc did not want to stand through so he cleared his throat to repeat it, but nicer, “why is it necessary that we are wearing undergarments, Waverly?”

“It’s not necessary,” (yes it was), “but you have to rub the dirt...well mud really, all over your bodies and someone has to stand here and say these words and…”

Bobo hooked his fingers into Doc’s pants to pull them away from his skin and drag him a step back so he could look under them. He had let go before Doc could shake him off, but he announced, “pity.”

Waverly cleared her throat, “I’m going to go get water. We need water. And eggs, I should just get eggs too.” 

When she was gone, it was only Dolls looking at them from across the room. He wasn’t even standing, but sitting behind a desk, with a book as fat as a tree split open in front of him. 

“I guess we’ll just...wait,” Bobo said.

“Quietly,” Dolls said back, “and preferably back in the jail cell.”

\--

“A dead body has been wrapped in this.” Bobo did not make the words sound like they could be refuted. There was no room for any denial; it was an absolute fact. Even if there had been any chance he was wrong, Doc could not summon enough reasonable doubt to provide a counter-argument. 

They were standing on the frayed edge of a faded black tarp with stains of every possible nature stretched across it from one corner to another. There were long streaks like fingernail scratches in sets of four here and there. 

“More than one,” Bobo corrected as he counted them with a lazy, bouncing finger. “This can’t be sanitary.”

“Funny,” Wynonna gasped as she dropped the bucket of dirt she’d dragged back from the graveyard, “I didn’t know revenants were worried about germs.” She straightened up, still panting from exertion, wrinkling up her eyebrows at the discovery that they were standing there without shirts, shoes or socks. “What’s going on?”

“They have to be naked,” Waverly said. She had already put the green plastic bins in the middle of the room with a gallon of water in each. There was a stack of more water to the side, in case there wasn’t enough mud to be made with the amount she had already poured. “Well, jump in,” she said. “You just have to mix the dirt and water and then when you’re ready, I’ll read the words and you rub the...mud...on.”

“I’m sorry,” Wynonna did not sound sorry, “they have to be _naked_?”

“Well, for it to be _most_ effective, they have to cover the _most_ skin they can?”

Bobo was rolling his eyes and shoving his jeans down his legs. Any other man in his position might have taken at least a moment to consider the audience, but Bobo did not seem to think the presence of two young ladies and a very angry man warranted a second of pause. He kicked his jeans back at the wall and stood there in nothing but his fire-red underwear. “Come on, Henry. Don’t be shy.”

“Please be wearing underwear,” Waverly was whispering behind him.

There was nothing to be done but removing his jeans, so he did but he wasn’t as bold and aggressively _uncaring_ as Bobo. He would have _preferred_ not to be all but naked to the skin in front of a crowd. (Specifically this crowd.) 

The tubs were close enough together they could crouch side-by-side and mix up their own mud. They were rubbing naked knees and elbows, scooping handfuls of dirt, worms, rocks and grassroots into an inch of water at the bottom of a green bucket. 

“This is something I thought I would never have to see,” Wynonna said.

“It is mud,” Doc said, he leaned far enough to the side to make sure Bobo had made something that could be considered mud. There was no sense in drawing this out a moment longer than it had to be. 

“Ok,” Waverly picked up the book and came around the desk to stand on the tarp. She was clearing her throat, mouthing the sounds of the words she was about to use. “So now you just...start rubbing the mud on yourselves. Or each other? It’s not clear about who rubs the mud where. Just that the mud gets all over both of you.”

“Don’t touch me,” Doc hissed. 

Bobo was rolling his eyes as he dropped both his fists into the bucket in front of him with far too much effort. All the muscles on his arms and shoulders were tensing up in an overt show of strength. There was nobody in their present audience that would have cared about this sort of peacocking, but it did not appear that Bobo cared. No, he pulled his handful of mud out and started rubbing it on his chest with _exaggerated_ satisfaction. 

“Uh, you too,” Waverly said, “you both have to do it at the same time.”

The mud was gritty, and cold, and it did not slide on his skin but cake on it and scrape across the surface. There was an even chance that he was smashing all manner of bugs into his arms and chest and legs for no reason as there was this would break a curse. 

“I’ll get your back,” Bobo said like he _cared_. As if he had not just been waiting for any excuse he could find to slap his hand on Doc’s skin and grind the grit in. 

They were suitably covered in the thick black stink of graveyard mud by the time Waverly finished her incantation. There was a circle of audience members staring at them as if they expected some sort of explosion of lights to indicate the job had been completed. 

Bobo was stirring the remains of the mud in the bottom of his bucket while he waited. “Do you feel anything? I don’t feel anything.”

“Maybe it doesn’t feel like anything?” Waverly suggested.

“Test it,” Dolls said, “you two said you can’t walk away from one another, so get up and try to walk away from one another.”

“That’s not going to work,” Wynonna said. “Bobo’s not going to just _walk_ away if he thinks I’m going to shoot him if he can? And I _will_ be shooting him, as soon as I can.”

Doc stood up because someone _needed_ to add some common sense back into the conversation before it derailed itself any further. “Wynonna,” he said as _pleasantly_ as he could while covered in mud that was making his skin crawl, “I understand your desire to shoot Bobo Del Rey and I _sympathize_ but we need to be focusing on one problem at a time. The problem that we are currently faced with is that I cannot stand the man and yet I am physically incapable of separating from him.”

“Maybe we just see what happens to Doc?” Waverly didn’t even like the sound of it as she was saying it. “I mean, Doc wouldn’t lie to us?”

Dolls certainly had a great deal of things to think about that.

“Fine,” Wynonna said, she pulled Peacemaker out of it’s holster and pressed the end of the barrell against Bobo’s head. It lit up orange and started to _sizzle_ as soon as it touched his skin. “You walk away, and Bobo will stay _here_. Won’t you?”

“It isn’t going to work,” Bobo said, but he didn’t move.

It wasn’t going to work but that didn’t mean they weren’t going to have to prove it. Doc was praying to wake up from a bad dream, where all of this was the product of too much whiskey, but there was nothing that was going to save him now. He drew in a breath and took a step _away_ across the crinkled tarp half-splattered with mud. 

Waverly had retreated to behind a desk but Dolls was standing there like a prison guard with his arms crossed in front of his body. Whatever was tying him to Bobo was like a raw wound, like it was a living thing and it knew it was being threatened. It was _pulsating_ in his gut before he even managed a single step. It was the sensation of being _prey_ , of knowing you weren’t going to get out of this alive. 

The pain was almost an afterthought, building like a fire from the base of his spine. It curled into his bones, hollowed them out and filled them again. He was thinking of retreating, but Bobo was behind him saying something a lot like:

“It’s _not_ going to work.”

And the hammer of Peacemaker clicked when it drew back. Wynonna was going to shoot him just for annoying her. (Well, that among other unfortunate things.) 

Doc took another step and his vision got all grey at the edges. He was staring down Dolls as the man cocked an unimpressed eyebrow at him. This must have been funny as hell from the outside, but here on the inside of the curse, it was like being turned on a spit.

The itch of his mud-covered skin turned _vile_ , like a thousand ants creeping over him, an uncountable collection of feet and _jaws_. Breathing became its own special kind of hell, and his legs were turning rubbery. He hadn’t even made it the full length of the tarp and he wasn’t going to.

He barely made it another step, when his foot touched the tarp it felt like the flesh peeling back from the bones, like all at once every bit of meat that made up his body was being _ripped_ and no sane man could have kept his feet beneath him. 

That sound, that awful, wrenching sound, that might have been him. It was hard to separate the scrape of his own voice in his throat from the sensation of being carved up by a curse. He couldn’t have been held responsible for anything, because he did not _remember_ any event that took him from that last footstep to the touch of salvation dragging him bodily backward into a blissful reprieve from the pain.

But he opened his eyes to a disaster.

Dolls was clutching his hand at the air, like he’d been holding something that wasn’t there _anymore_. The desks had been shoved back so suddenly they’d left grooves in the floor. Wynonna’s voice was floating in from somewhere, gasping:

“What the fuck?”

And Bobo’s stupid naked, mud-covered arms were wrapped around Doc’s shoulders. Peacemaker was pressed between his sizzling arm and Doc’s chest.

“Uh,” Waverly called from where she’d ended up trapped under a desk shoved against the wall. “So...it didn’t work?”

\--

Doc was _conscious_ but he was not in a useful state of consciousness. He was as much a part of what was happening around him as a bowl of soup might have been. And much like a bowl of soup, he had been picked up from the floor and set on a chair and left there. Someone had thrown the offensively ugly pink shirt across his lap like draping a bowl of soup with a napkin to keep flies out.

“But I thought revenants _couldn’t_ touch Peacemaker,” sounded very much like Waverly being shoved behind someone bigger than her.

“He’s not _a_ revenant, he’s like the _king_ of the revenants.” 

“It might have been nice to _know_ that he can move metal with his mind.” Dolls was more offended than most of them. “So we could have _prepared_. I mean, before this morning. Which, by the way, how long have you known he can move metal with his mind?”

“I didn’t know it was _just_ metal.”

Now, Doc Holliday might have taken some exception to these sorts of conversations. He might have even had an opinion on how he was being separated from them by the mostly naked man standing between him and the crowd. But a bowl of soup was not known for its _wits_.

“You _don’t_ know that it’s _just_ metal,” Bobo agreed, “you _think_ it’s _just_ metal.”

“Look buddy, I am just _itching_ for a reason to shoot you, so if you want to stay alive, keep your mouth shut.” 

A bowl of soup was not alive and therefore could not care that it would be dead if it’s curse partner was dead. 

“Ok, ok,” Waverly was saying, “listen. We all want the same thing. We all want to break the curse--this didn’t work? We have other ways. Nobody needs to _shoot_ anyone.”

“If you shoot me, Doc dies. Unless that little _demonstration_ wasn’t enough for you.” 

“Holy water!” Waverly interjected over what might have been a great deal of hateful staring. “I found some anecdotal evidence that if you drink _holy water_ while turning in a circle three times and then _spit_ over your shoulder it’ll banish any bad spirits or lift any curses that may have been put on you.”

“Have you _been_ listening?” Bobo growled, “this isn’t a _bad spirit_. The Stone Witch cursed us. He can’t even stand.”

Wynonna had dug into this idea and she was _not_ going to give it up until they’d exhausted it. Even a bowl of soup could figure that out just from looking at her. From watching how she stepped forward to lean into Bobo’s space like he was nothing but a bug waiting to be crushed. “Why can you?” she asked, “maybe _you_ aren’t as important as you want us to believe.”

Oh hell, Doc pressed his hands against the chair and shoved himself back to his liquidy legs. There wasn’t enough bone left to his bones, but he found the breath to say, “Wynonna.” 

He meant to add something else. Maybe something about how Doc was mostly human and Bobo was 100% hell-spawn. He might have pointed out any number of things about how in-fighting wasn’t going to help. But he’d used up all the reserves he had left. 

“So we just need holy water?” Waverly said.

“Sure,” Bobo said.

“ _Great_ ,” Wynonna added. Then she shifted to the side and pushed Doc so he landed back in the chair. “You look like you’re about to pass out again. Stay in the chair.”

Bobo’s back was glowing like a fire now, that mark was searing through his skin. He wasn’t making a sound and he didn’t need to, because anyone with eyes could see it and anyone with a sense of smell could taste the smokiness in the air. 

“I’ll be back,” Wynonna said (mostly to Bobo, mostly like a threat).

\--

Doc did not _wake up_ but he did reach a level of consciousness that allowed him to retain some higher functions, such as becoming aware of the fact that he was still almost entirely naked. The mud had dried into a flaking layer of filth. It had started rubbing off where his arms rested against the chair. 

Bobo had been turned gray by it but he had managed to put his own pants back on. 

“What are we doing next?” he asked. There had been a discussion, he remembered that but the particulars of that discussion seemed to be foggy and imprecise. “Where are my pants?”

Bobo picked his jeans up from on top of the desk and dropped them on his lap. He wasn’t offering any more details, just sitting with one of his feet on the chair by Doc’s thigh and his full attention glowering across the room at where Dolls was reassembling his gun. 

“Drink holy water,” Waverly said.

“ _Can_ Bobo drink holy water?” Doc asked. It did not seem like the sort of thing a creature brought back from the depths of hell would tolerate. He shook his jeans out and made some meager attempt to rub the mud off his legs but it caked up on his palms. 

It was more often better for a man to be suitably dressed than to be perfectly clean.

“Oh,” Waverly said, “I don’t know. Can you?”

Bobo’s answer was a snarl that could not be translated to words.

Waverly wasn’t hiding, but she was staring at him with a peculiar amount of attention. And only _him_ , she wasn’t looking at Bobo and she hadn’t glanced at Dolls. She was looking at him like she was working out what to make of what she was seeing. “Doc,” was the exact sound any person alive made right before they were about to ask for confirmation of a known fact, “do you...feel...anything _strange_ ? Anything _unusual_? Anything you wouldn’t normally feel?”

He felt as if he had been roasted, cut up and served for dinner. He felt as if he might never sufficiently recognize his own body again. He felt a great _deal_ of things that he had not normally felt in his life and not a single one of them could be categorized as anything _but_ strange. Still, he stuffed his legs into his jeans as he shook his head, “I do not believe so.”

“No _special_ feelings for Bobo?” 

_That_ made Bobo look away from his staring match with Dolls. It dragged all that festering anger with it. “Special?” 

“I just mean…”

“You just mean…” Bobo repeated. His tongue dragged along the words, making them sound as stupid as he could manage, and his teeth clicked together. “Does he want to fuck me? Is that what you mean?”

“No,” Waverly whispered but she _meant_ yes.

“Why don’t you ask me? Why don’t you ask me if I have any _special_ feelings for Henry?”

“I do _not_ ,” Doc interrupted before they could all be treated to a special viewing of the Bobo Del Rey drama hour. “At present, I am not experiencing _any_ sexual attraction. Least of all to Bobo.” 

It was as good a time as any to stand up and pull his pants up. Bobo watched him in a way that was inappropriate at best, letting his gaze slide across Doc’s body like he was _appraising_ him.

“You’re not my type,” he said, “too skinny,” he held his hands up like little cups at his chest, “no tits.”

“Oh my _God_ ,” Waverly whispered across the room.

“Please stop talking,” Dolls said.

Bobo didn’t need a single damn word to go back to staring at the man. Doc could have used a few to work out why he was being asked about his feelings for Bobo. Waverly was sinking back into reading the same book she’d been staring at all day. 

\--

As it turned out, the only part of drinking holy water and turning in circles that was unpleasant was how it made his already aching head spin. By the time he made the third revolution he’d forgotten everything he had been told at the start.

“You have to spit!” sounded a lot like Waverly, and she had become the unofficial boss of this unfortunate situation.

Bobo snorted, “maybe he likes swallowing. I could be into that.”

“You’re disgusting,” Wynonna said.

Doc spit out the last of the holy water he had not managed to swallow. It mixed with the mud on the tarp and made a sort of sludge that made even just standing still on it dangerous. His balance was still shit from the last attempt and Bobo was doing most of the work of holding them both upright, leaning against Doc like he was. 

“Do you feel any different?” Waverly asked.

Doc felt dizzy but that had nothing at all to do with what she was asking. Bobo growled a non-committal noise against Doc’s back. “I assume you wish us to test the efficacy of the cure?”

“Well…” Waverly did not want to test it. She didn’t want to even mention it. 

Wynonna was _in pain_ with indecision, watching him like he had somehow developed a terminal disease in the past hour or so. Dolls was a cold-hearted man, not saying a word, but all the same being the one that was going to insist they test it.

Any good theory had to be tested.

“I got this one,” Bobo said. He turned them around so they were facing each other, one of his hands on Doc’s arms because standing up was still somewhat iffy. He was looking at him like trying to figure out how he wished to proceed, and then with no warning at all, he punched Doc in the ribs. 

As punches went, it was unmemorable. 

But Bobo landed on his knees in a heap with both arms around his chest and his yowl of pain turning thick and red. He was blistering heat and biting curses through his clenched teeth. Doc felt sorry for the bastard, and not sorry all at the same time. 

“It does not appear to have worked,” Doc said.

“We’re just going to believe that?” Wynonna asked. 

It looked real enough for him. Doc leaned down to press his hand against Bobo’s back. It did nothing at all for him, the soft pulp of the pain on his chest had nothing to do with the curse, but it _eased_ something. Some tense connection between them, and Bobo’s grip on his own body relaxed as his breath started to even out. 

“Oh,” Wynonna said. “Well--what’s next?”

“I bought eggs?” 

\--

“Are we supposed to be saying anything?” Wynonna asked. She was standing behind Doc rubbing an egg back and forth across his shoulders. He couldn’t see her face but it must have been one of those deeply confused looks because her voice was all out of sorts. 

“No?” Waverly said, “so I asked Officer Haught if there were any extra coats left lying around and she gave me this.” The coat she was holding up was made of an unidentifiable neon material. It did not look big enough to cover _Waverly_ much less sufficient in size to cover Doc. “We could steal _Nedley_ ’s coat, but he’d probably notice.”

“Nedley’s like twice as big as Doc,” Wynonna finished with the egg and set it back into the carton at the side. “How many of these eggs am I supposed to rub on him?”

Bobo had not said a word since his misplaced act of chivalry. All of his sounds were made with rumbles. None of them seemed to convey an idea that he believed in their plan. But he was standing obediently in place, letting Doc roll the egg between his palm and Bobo’s back. 

It was meant to gather up curses, Waverly said. 

Doc was no expert on the way these things worked, but if given an option between mud bathing, holy water drinking and egg rolling he would have certainly chosen eggs to start with. The worst that could be said about it was that the eggs were cold on his skin.

“The whole dozen?” Wavery said. “It has to be a big curse? I mean, big enough to make Doc and Bobo seem... _friendly_ to each other?”

“Right,” Wynonna whispered, “ _friendly_.”

And really, for the first time in their brief acquaintance, Doc had to agree with Bobo. The only possible way to make it through was simply to stop giving an opinion on what was happening around them.

\--

Bobo had settled for holding the eggs above his head and letting them drop one after another. They cracked when they hit the ground, splattered their perfectly normal yolks in every direction. Doc had thrown his, out of some notion that he could spare his boots the splatter, but after a dozen eggs, it didn’t appear to matter how far they’d thrown the damn things, it was like standing in the center of a bloodbath.

“Anything?” Waverly asked. She was wrapped up in a coat that fit her, wearing gloves and a hat. “ _Any_ differences at all? A little bit less cursed?”

Doc needed a drink. This particular crossroads had not put them out of walking distance to a particular bar that was popularly known as the place where Wyatt drank. If he was going to be reduced to a bowl of soup just to prove that he was, as he had said he was, cursed to be connected to Bobo then he was going to do so in a direction that ended with liquor.

“No,” he did bother to say.

Bobo grunted his agreement that this act of petty vandalism had done nothing to diminish the effects of the curse.

“Maybe we’re not using the right kinds of cures for the kind of curse you’ve got,” Wynonna said. She had both her hands shoved into her jacket while she shifted from one foot to the other. It was a slight improvement over her constant attempts to shoot Bobo in the head. (Although it might just be a sign that they had drawn a crowd, and she could _not_ shoot a revenant in the face in a public thoroughfare.) “How do you feel about each other? Romantic? Brotherly? Brother-in-arms-er-lee?”

“Fucking-er-lee?” Bobo prompted.

Doc started walking. There was a twinge on the first step, and a sort of pinch at the second, but nothing that could be qualified as pain as he landed the third step. 

“Hey!” Waverly shouted.

“Did we do it?”

No, he could feel the curse. He could feel it like bands of cotton wrapped around his body, dragging at his forward momentum. _Something_ was tying him to Bobo and it hadn’t _stopped_ , it had just _changed_. He half turned to look back and found Bobo staring at his own hands like he’d never seen them. 

Doc took another step forward, Bobo took a step back. The stretch went _taut_ , like they’d found the end of the slack. If he moved any farther it _would_ hurt. 

They both knew it. They could feel it. 

Bobo sighed because just as well as they both knew this was all the farther they _could_ go, they also both knew that it couldn’t be _explained_. No answer they gave about how it felt, or why it had happened would be satisfying enough to the Earp sisters working themselves up to a victory dance at the side.

Doc was shaking his head as he turned to face forward again. The next step felt like a twig snapping. He wasn’t sufficiently recovered from the last time, and there was simply no preparing for the sort of pain that was coming for him. He didn’t have the mental _resolve_ to let it hit him slowly so he threw himself forward. 

It came on all at once and somehow that was _better_. He wasn’t easing into it, he was being drowned by it. All at once, a great howling agony that pulled his legs out from under him. 

“Oh shit!” sounded a lot like Wynonna. “Doc!”

Something was dragging him backward; it had to have been Wynonna, or Waverly, or hell even _Dolls_. It was something clutching at him like wasps stings, dragging him across a bed of heated spikes, trying to be of some help and doing nothing but filleting his skin off. 

Bobo’s hands were salvation; the only cool touch in a world of fire. Doc couldn’t even be certain where all his limbs were at the moment; he wasn’t responsible for how he might have been sprawled on the road. He couldn’t control how his arms wriggled into Bobo’s coat to clutching at his back and drag him forward. He was smothering himself with Bobo’s body and it was the only thing that dimmed the pain. 

“This is bullshit,” Wynonna was saying from somewhere beyond the blanket of fur covering them. 

\--

Doc was at the bar; he had a drink. 

Oh hell, he had a drink.

He had been outside, on the road and now he was here. He had a vague idea of a memory of being pulled to his feet and guided this far but it was hard to sort out the things that had really happened from the things he thought _might_ have happened.

But he was here now. He was having a drink, at a table, surrounded by the uncertain and unhappy faces of Wynonna and Waverly Earp. Even dour-faced Deputy Dolls was eying him with something like genuine worry. 

Bobo was not worried; Bobo was a shuddering mass of fury. He was a shivering mound of fur, pressing his hands together between his spread knees, leaning forward like a vulture. There was something inky and unpleasant in the air around him, like a fire that had been left to burn too long. 

“So,” Waverly said very softly. 

“You will have to excuse me if I do not feel up to answering your questions at the moment,” Doc said. (Or thought he did.)

“There is _one_ more thing we could try but if none of the other things worked…”

Bobo was speaking in growls again and this one was using words that ought not be used in the direction of young ladies. 

“It’s possible that we can’t break the curse because we’re not looking at the _right kind_ of curse.”

“Please,” Wynonna said like a wheeze, with her eyes squeezed shut, “do not ask them if they want to fuck one another again. Please. They don’t. They’ve said they don’t. They don’t.”

“Well, it wouldn’t be their fault,” Waverly objected, “if the curse is tying them together until they,” she mashed her hands together in a way that did not seem to indicate anything appealing or sexual, “do the deed?”

“What are you _twelve_? If you can’t say fuck, then you shouldn’t be fucking.”

“Wynonna!”

Dolls cleared his throat before they could start shouting at one another. That one little sound settled the full of Bobo Del Rey’s not-insignificantly sized rage on the man. It might have been imagination but it felt as if everything _metallic_ in the immediate area picked itself up and set itself back down slightly to the left of where it started. 

“I think there’s clearly something else at work here. Whether it’s _sexual_ or something _else_ , I don’t think mud and holy water is going to work.”

“What if it’s a _whole lot_ of holy water?” Wynonna asked. 

“That is the last thing,” Waverly said like she did not want to admit it. No she was lingering on that hateful lean of Bobo’s body, taking in the shrinking space between Doc’s body and Bobo’s. “ _But_ we’d have to submerge them both. Completely. At the same time. To the neck.”

“Where are we going to find something big enough to fit two grown men?” 

“I have an idea,” Waverly said, “but it’s gonna suck.”

\--

How Wynonna Earp had found a pastor willing to cross a snow-covered cow field to bless a trough of murky water at five-oh-nine in the afternoon was one of those fine details that Doc Holliday would have been very interested in knowing. (Of course, knowing Wynonna as he did, her answer might have just been: ‘boobs’.)

“So we just get in this?” Doc asked.

“There’s probably a better way to do this,” Waverly said. Perhaps her hesitation was due to the temperature that was leaving all of them with pink-tipped noses. Perhaps she was eyeballing the metal deathtrap she was asking him to voluntarily enter with a man who could crush metal with his mind. 

It could have just been guilt.

“I brought towels,” Wynonna said. That was like bringing a bottle of water to a forest fire.

Bobo was not being helpful. He was not speaking. He was not making eye contact that did not involve him grinding his teeth in the direction of Deputy Marshall Dolls. 

“How long are we required to remain in this,” icy death trap, “tub of holy water?”

“For a minute?” Waverly cleared her throat, “but I mean, you _really_ don’t have to do this. It’s been almost a full day since you were cursed, hasn’t it? Don’t you think that the _purpose_ of the _curse_ would have become obvious by now? If we could just figure out _what_ kind of curse it is, we could have a much more targeted approach…”

“Waverly,” Dolls said. “Do you think this could work?”

“Well, the egg thing kind of worked? Maybe the more of these we do, the weaker the curse gets?”

Doc pulled the ugly plastic zipper of his borrowed coat and shrugged it off. Bobo didn’t even look at him, he just started stripping off his clothes, breathing like an enraged bull. They were down to their filthy gray skin and underwear like they’d started. 

“A minute,” Doc said.

“A minute once you’re completely submerged, up to your neck.”

If the curse itself was a sort of hellfire, the water was a barrel of knives laced with salt. Every single part of his body was _screaming_ in protest, railing against the stupidity of getting any further in. He hadn’t managed more than one leg into the tub, just up to his knee, and he was starting to think that he’d _rather_ be tied to Bobo Del Rey for eternity than proceed.

His foot had not even touched the murky bottom of the trough and he could not _imagine_ what sort of man was capable of voluntarily throwing himself to this sort of death. The air was bitterly cold against his naked skin without the venomous bite of the _water_ stealing what little heat he had left.

It was only his leg and it felt like he couldn’t _breathe_.

“No,” was the first word Bobo had said in what felt like hours. It was as absolute as his growls. He lifted his hand with his fingers spread out as flat as they could go and the trough shivered and groaned and split in every direction. It was flattened out like an oblong daisy in the grass. 

“Bobo!” That could have been Waverly and it might have been Wynonna. 

It was hard to hear things properly over the chattering of his clenched teeth. Bobo was a flurry of motion, a great graceful arch of pure anger as he swept his coat from the ground to wrap around Doc. He pulled it around him and cinched it shut in the front. 

He had one fist holding it closed and the other arm flung out to the side, his eyes were turning all red-and-dark rimmed. That growl he’d been working on all day was becoming a chorus of snarls, and the gun that Dolls must have been trying to draw smacked into Bobo’s hand. 

“We are _not_ doing anymore _tests_ ,” he said. 

“Put the gun down,” Wynonna said. 

This was an old fashion standoff. Bobo was _not_ putting the gun down, he was not even going to consider the idea. Whatever willingness he’d had to play along had been used up. 

Wynonna wasn’t going to lower Peacemaker when she’d been looking for an excuse to use it all day. It didn’t matter how she’d looked at the bar, caught on the edge of realizing that this whole miserable day amounted to torture. It didn’t matter that shooting Bobo wouldn’t help any of them. It only mattered that there was a gun pointed at someone Wynonna _loved_ and she could not simply let that stand.

“I really think you should just have sex!” Waverly shouted. She had nothing to hide behind, but she gave the impression of shouting from behind a tree. 

Bobo was no less angry, and he was no less likely to empty the entire clip of bullets in Dolls’ direction. “Sure,” he snarled at no one in particular, his fist tightened in the coat and he pulled Doc forward, “ _bend over_ Henry.”

“Whoa!” Wynonna shouted. “We do _not_ bend people over.” 

“That’s a strange line,” Bobo hissed at her. He took a step forward and Doc had to go with him. “You’ve done everything else, I’ve been to _hell_ Wynonna. Have you? I know _all_ about lines and the sort of people that cross them. You don’t want me to bend your buddy over? Do you know what this curse _feels_ like?” He was leaning into the press of Peacemaker now, letting it run across his forehead like a hot brand. “I’d _rather_ be in hell, and I’ll take him with me. So,” he stepped back and spread his arms, “shoot me.”

Wynonna was staring at Doc, and that was a funny thing for her to be doing all things considered. He was attempting to convey a sense of wellness, or at least the notion that things would be well again. Except the only reason he was still standing was the very tight grip the coat had on his person and the demon that was holding the coat. 

Wynonna sighed, “fine. _Fine_. We’ll reconvene tomorrow, we’ll try to figure this curse thing out and we won’t cover you in mud or eggs or whatever the other thing was.”

“You can’t just let them leave,” Dolls hissed.

“I can,” Wynonna said, “and I _am_.” 

Bobo didn’t give up the gun but picked up their clothes and threw them over the arm holding the coat closed around Doc’s body. He brushed past Dolls when he was finished, with one last sneer, “I’m keeping the gun,” like it even _needed_ to be said, “for _protection_.”

“I can drive you!” Waverly was shouting from somewhere behind them.

“No you are not,” Wynonna hissed at her. She yelped in surprise at the end of the words and Bobo was smirking to himself as he closed his fingers around her keys. 

“You, sir,” Doc said as he was dragged toward Wynonna’s truck, “are an asshole.”

“You’re a pussy,” Bobo growled back, he yanked open the door of the truck, “get in.”


	4. Chapter 4

Henry was as pliable as a handful of warm dough; he couldn’t be let go of for a moment without his body wilting to the ground. Even when he was standing, the most he managed to do was loop an arm around Bobo’s shoulders with the _idea_ of hanging on. By the time Bobo dragged him back into the hotel from the truck, even that had waned to a sort of exhausted chuckle of effort. 

Holliday _collapsed_ , he did not sit. He did not fall. He simply did not have control over any part of his body that allowed him to do more than land on the bed when Bobo released him. He was _breathing_ and that appeared to be the extent of his abilities. 

Bobo was going to _skin_ the witch. He was going to slice her pretty white skin from her mutated insides and he was going to rub her down with salt just to hear her scream. He’d line them all up, the witch, the _Deputy Marshal_ , the _heir_ and her shitty little sister. He would take his time with them, slice into their flesh until his knife went dull.

Maybe he’d string Henry up for putting his hands up in surrender to start with. Maybe he’d take his chances at figuring out how far he could go before he couldn’t stand the pain anymore. (But he knew, didn’t he? He already knew how far Henry could make it before he couldn’t take it another second.) 

“Fuck,” he snarled. 

He was naked to his filthy skin, staring at Henry’s face twitching toward something like consciousness. He was coated in the stink of graveyard dirt, and shit and raw eggs. 

“Get up,” he growled. He pulled Holliday up by the arm and barely got more than a grouchy whine for the effort. He dragged him into the bathroom and put him in the tub. The cold of the porcelain made Henry open his eyes with a grunt.

“ _What_ are you doing?” he mumbled. He couldn’t even open his eyes for longer than a matter of seconds. He flinched at the water coming out of the spout. “Oh,” he grumbled as his head fell back against the tiles, “you are bathing me.” 

Apparently, he was.

\--

People did not touch Bobo, and the people who _did_ were not the ones that any man would have wanted touching them. They weren’t lingering their touch on his skin with any sense of _want_. They had no intentions of pressing against his body with tenderness; they were gripping his flesh to rip into it. 

The witch and her filthy mouth and her grating laugh. She had a tongue like a serpent, snaking into him when there was something she wanted from him. Her nails had been claws, drawing blood just to prove that she could but she had _never_ touched him in any way that wasn’t of _use_ to her.

What few lovers he had were temporary, their touches were passion and violence and _brief_. They left him with a fine sweat and the slow ooze of his own blood on his back. 

But people didn’t touch him _like this_ : bare skin and soft breath resting on his back, lazy fingers sketching the length of that mark that never fully faded from his back. Oh hell had split him open along the seams of that fire, and he hadn’t gone easy like all those bastards with brands on their skulls. They had torn into him for what had felt like _years_ , searching for the thing that had kept him fighting, and they must have found it or gotten tired of trying because they sewed him up a brand new man.

Henry was muscle-and-bone wrapped in skin made soft by virtue of not seeing the sunlight. His face was a scratch of yesterday’s unshaven mess and his breath was so soft you might have thought he was still sleeping. Oh, but his fingertips were rough as sandpaper, trying to be gentle, wandering along thoughts and old scars. His leg was across the backs of Bobo’s thighs, his weight was settled into place the way you only ever were with a lover. His voice was so quiet it was all but asking not to be heard, “I didn’t think things like you had to sleep.”

Bobo was facing the other way, looking at the door and not at the man with no sense of personal space. He opened his eyes just enough to see the slant of sunlight breaking through the ugly curtains at the front of the room. There were plenty of things to say about that. Nasty little words like, _I didn’t think men like you surrendered_. Ugly little truths about how he might not have to sleep very often, but there was only so much a man could take no matter what his insides were made of. 

Henry didn’t want an answer anyway. He leaned back to rest his face against the pillow and not Bobo’s back, his hand moved as he pulled away, palm-flat and skating across the dull ache of yesterday’s pain. “I seem to be having some trouble remembering how I came to be wearing these,” he plucked at the thin cotton of the pants Bobo had put him in the night before.

“You’re a smart man,” Bobo said, he pushed his elbows into the bed so he could roll onto his side. It stretched the space between them, made it so Henry would have to hook his leg over Bobo’s or keep his thighs to himself. They were making a mockery of intimacy, looking at one another in dim light. “I’m sure you can figure it out.”

“I _do_ recall you telling Wynonna that you would take me to hell,” he said, “all things considered, that is a place that I would rather not see for myself. Now, it has become apparent that the _witch_ had some justification for her decision to bind us together.”

“Could be,” Bobo said, “could be she knew you’d roll over for the first Earp that looked at you. All Wynonna has to do is say jump and there you are, asking how high.” 

Henry didn’t like having his loyalties questioned. He didn’t care for _implications_. He was clenching his teeth and looking _sideways_ because they were too close now to get away with lying. “I do also recall you called me a pussy.”

Bobo snorted.

“Still,” and Henry did look at him then, “it is apparent that your...assistance was helpful and so, as a gentleman, I am beholden to say thank you.”

That was a whole lot of words to say very little. A whole lot of time just to spit out: thank you for saving me from my _friends_. Bobo rolled onto his back and kicked at the blankets that were tangled around his legs. The room was too warm to need them and he didn’t care for how they smothered him. “Well,” he pulled the cigarettes off the side table, “while you’re _recalling_ , maybe you should recall the part where Waverly Earp thinks I should fuck you.”

Henry dropped his whole body against the bed with exasperation so great it knocked the headboard against the wall. He pulled all his limbs back toward his body like a retreat, sighing in defeat so great it filled up the space like a balloon. “That is _not_ what I recall Waverly saying.”

“You’ve got to read between the lines.” The cigarettes were shit, but the ones Bethany bought always were. There wasn’t an overwhelming level of sophistication in the sort of people that chose to follow him, so he’d learned to accept what passed for quality. They were shit, but they did the job, filling up his lungs with smoke. “ _She_ doesn’t know what sort of man you really were but I do.”

“Funny, while I am able to recognize many of the faces of your fellow revenants, _yours_ is not one that I have any memory of.” (No, of course he didn’t. Henry didn’t have time for men like Robert Svane.) He plucked the cigarette out of Bobo’s fingers so he could take a drag. His face was caught up in disgust, but he did not give it back. “And I would _prefer_ if Waverly Earp were not acquainted with the _less_ savory details of my _colorful_ reputation.”

Bobo rolled onto his knees, wrapped his hands around Henry’s skinny hips and pulled him into the center of the bed where the mattress dipped. He hadn’t had it in him to worry about putting a shirt on a pile of old bread dough the night before so Holliday was all skin under the twisted waistband of his sleep pants. “You can tell Waverly what you want, but _I_ am _not_ bending over for you so if you want to try out anymore _cures_...” He smiled at Henry’s attempt at outrage. 

The moment was interrupted by the rapid banging on the door. Wynonna’s voice was shouting in time with each strike of her fist, allowing everyone anywhere near them to hear her saying: “Hey! I hope you didn’t have sex! Waverly said there’s _chants_!” And she was quieter outside the door, only barely loud enough to hear, “please don’t have had sex.”

Henry’s eyes fluttered closed as all that gathering irritation in his body went limp and he collapsed on the bed, muttering, “chants. Of _course_.”

Bobo rolled off the bed, leaving Holliday a mess of sprawled limbs and messy hair. He made it most of the way to the door before the bond started to tighten. He could go the whole of his immortal life without ever feeling that intolerable hell of yesterday again. He turned the lock on the door with a concentrated thought.

Wynonna was standing there hoping to find they’d vacated the room, clutching a cup of coffee with a bright pink nose. “Oh _gross_ ,” she hissed when she saw him. 

Henry dragged himself to the edge of the bed. He was working the knots out of his hair with his fingers, aiming for something that wasn’t as damning as it looked. It was a hell of a hard sell with all those pressure marks on his naked skin, but his smile was known to charm any Earp in a hundred-yard-radius. If anyone could make Wynonna forget the obvious, it was John Henry Holliday. “Wynonna,” he said.

And she looked at him like he’d only barely survived hell, like he hadn’t been laying on Bobo’s back fifteen minutes ago. “Well, you look alive again,” she said with a smile.

(No thanks to _her_ ) Bobo picked up the clothes Bethany had brought him the night before and threw one set at Henry. “You’re welcome,” he said.

\--

Wynonna parked them outside the God-damn police station like they were simply going to walk back into that shit show of their own free will. Of course, _Henry_ would have and he’d proven that yesterday. It didn’t matter how he looked at the doors of the building like the gateway to hell; it didn’t matter how his body tensed up where it was pushed against Bobo’s in the bench seat of the truck. 

No, Henry was going to walk his stupid ass back into that building and listen to whatever bullshit interpretation Dolls and Waverly had found in their dusty books. 

Bobo kicked the door when he pushed it open. Wynonna shouted something wordless and angry at him as she kicked her own door open. Henry slid out of the cab like a man working up the energy to climb the gallows. And they all met on the right side of the truck.

“I don’t _know_ \--” Wynonna was working on an edge of fury about all the wrong things. She was so set on hating the wrong people she couldn’t see the fucking forest through the trees. 

“I played your games,” Bobo snarled back at her, “I let you do your stupid _tests_ and you were _wrong_. You want my cooperation? You want me to help you break this _curse_ , you play by _my_ rules now. Tell your boss, tell _Waverly_ if they want _me_ to listen to them, they’ll bring Henry’s belongings and their stupid books and they’ll meet me where _I_ want to meet.”

“Bobo,” Henry was saying.

“You don’t get to make the rules,” Wynonna hissed at him.

“No,” he was so close to her now he could feel his skin starting to crawl. It didn’t hurt but it didn’t feel _good_. “I do get to make the rules. You want _Henry?_ You go through me.” 

There was nothing left to be said about that. He reached back to grab Holliday by the arm above his bandaged wrist before the man could get any ideas about being stubborn. The only trouble with men like Henry is the only idea they _had_ was to be stubborn. He leaned back against the pull, dragging his feet like he even _wanted_ to go into that building. “Wynonna,” he said as he was pulled. There must not have been any words capable of communicating the odd mix of how Holliday did not want to be pulled and he did want to be saved and made it sound like he wasn’t picking Bobo over her. So there was nothing added to the whining way he said her name.

Bobo pulled him until they turned a corner, until they were just out of sight, and then he shoved him against the ugly brick wall and followed him so he was pressed flat. “ _Stop_ being a _pussy_.”

Henry sprawled out like a seastar, legs and arms spread to make room for Bobo pushing at his chest. But he was clenched-teeth-furious, hissing back, “I am of the opinion that you are not aware of the difficult situation we have found ourselves in. _Wynonna Earp_ wants to _kill_ you.”

“Not news.”

“What _is_ news is that she, like her forebears, is not the sort of person that is capable of _sharing_ so if you could make some attempt to remember that I am _not_ a piece of meat, that would make me _feel_ much more inclined to turn the situation in _our_ favor.”

Bobo’s hand was perfectly sized to slide up the length of Henry’s throat. His fingers fit under the line of his jaw like they’d been perfectly crafted to hold him there. “She’ll figure out, like _Wyatt_ did, that _you_ do not belong to her.”

Henry shoved him and Bobo let himself be shoved. “I do not belong to you, Bobo Del Rey.”

“But you _are_ stuck with me, and I’m _not_ letting Wynonna Earp and her BBD fuck buddy _fuck_ me anymore.”

There was no arguing that they hadn’t been fucked over the day before. There was no spin that Henry could put on the events that would have made them _better_. He was pink-faced and furious _now_ but he had holes in his memory of the day before because he’d stood there and let those pretty girls convince him to try out a bad idea. They had stared at him like a horror show and rubbed eggs on his back like a cure, and _still_ Henry was working out a defense. 

“Where,” was not at all the words that Henry wanted to be saying, “are we going?”

\--

Henry was only half-through eating when Wynonna showed up with his holster and hat, leaning against the booth like she’d rather have shot them both through the window than be standing there now. 

“Breakfast?” she said, “Bobo Del Rey gets _hangry_?”

Waverly was right at her back, one of her arms wrapped around a book that was leaving dust imprints on her jacket. The sisters were standing at the end of the table, looking at the seating options in a way that was going to take _forever_ to arrive at the obvious conclusion.

Bobo slid out of his side of the booth, around the end of the table and through the narrow space Wynonna’s leaning body left him to drop into the space at Henry’s side. He took the holster from her and Henry reached around his back to take the hat. 

“Well,” Wynonna said, “this is going to be _great_.” She put Waverly into the booth first, tucked her up against the wall like there was some safety to be found there. The table was barely big enough for all their elbows, much less the clutter of plates that had already been scraped clean. 

(Of course, if they had taken another few minutes, Henry might have actually finished eating.)

“Um,” Waverly said very softly, “so… Obviously what we were doing yesterday wasn’t working. We don’t _appear_ to be dealing with your average curse. And if there was something coming after you, we probably would have seen it by now and Wynonna could have shot it but--”

“No such luck.”

Henry was smashed into the corner of the booth, caught between leaning back and accepting that meant pressing up against Bobo’s body and leaning forward like a crushed accordion. He was an idiot, pushing his plate toward the edge to drink coffee like modern-day women hadn’t figured out men had to eat to stay alive. “I am fuzzy on some of the details, but I believe you said we should have sex?”

“Yeah,” Waverly said, “I did say that. So I did some more research last night, I was looking for curses that had to do with--well, it’s just, it’s obvious that the two of you are more _comfortable_ when you’re closer...together…”

“Gross,” Wynona repeated.

“Jealousy’s an ugly color,” Bobo said.

Henry’s eyes fluttered closed again, that tense of annoyance ran straight through him, and when he opened his eyes he was only looking at Waverly. “And you found?”

“There’s a _number_ of curses that all use a similar tactic. I mean, you _two_? You two weren’t friends before you were cursed, you were-- Well, you _said_ you weren’t allies. But the point is, if you didn’t like one another before, there’s curses that just make you,” she motioned her hands together again, threading her fingers so her palms were smashed flat, “stay close. And there’s some evidence that you can _trick_ the curse by…”

Bobo had seen any number of curses, he’d seen hell. He’d seen demons. He’d seen the witch at work and he had _never_ seen anyone that _tricked_ his way out of black magic. 

“Trick,” Henry repeated.

“Well, it’s like a true love’s kiss?” Waverly said. 

“With dicks?” Bobo added.

“Bobo!” Wynonna hissed, “this is a _family_ diner.” 

“If it’s the type of curse that I think it is, you just have to be _convincing_ enough to make it _seem_ real. And there--”

Bobo lifted his arm to lay it across Henry’s hunched forward shoulders, his fingers pushed at the man’s jaw so he was leaning in and tipping his head back. His mouth was warm-and-coffee stained. Just right there, when it should have been a fight, the man gave in. He ran his tongue across his lips before Bobo kissed him. His pulse was skipping like a wild horse, the arm trapped between them flinched like he was trying to get it around Bobo’s back. 

“Oh my _God_ ,” Waverly gasped from across the table, “there’s children! No, there’s _chants_. You have to chant first, you don’t-- Guys!”

Henry moved back first, wiping his wet mouth with the sleeve of Bobo’s shirt he was wearing. “You might have mentioned that earlier.”

Wynonna wasn’t glaring at _Bobo_. No, the fullness of her stare was settled on John Henry Holliday; she was biting back all the quips and the curses and the impulsive little nonsense things she said. She was working it _out_ in her head, discovering the same thing that Wyatt had figured out well over a hundred years ago. 

Bobo couldn’t have imagined he’d be here, watching another Earp come to the same realization, but _hell_ if it wasn’t nice to be on the outside of it for once. He picked up his cup of coffee, “if you want to chant over our bed, you’ll just have to come back to the hotel to do it.”

Wynonna did look at him, thin-lipped and fed up. “No,” she said, “ _Waverly_ is not going anywhere _with you_.” She shoved herself up to standing, “we’ll figure out somewhere the two of you can _trick_ the curse. Come on Waverly.”

“Oh,” Waverly whispered, “oh, ok.”

Henry was holding his coffee mug like a whiskey glass, staring at it with disappointment. “I need a drink,” he said as soon as they were alone, and _quieter_ , “and we need a _God-damn_ plan.”

“I thought you had one,” Bobo said, “something like _just keep doing what the tits tell you until you’re dead_.”

“You can’t trick a curse,” Henry said. He looked over his shoulder, back at Bobo shaking his head in agreement. They were stretching that moment, trying to argue out what they meant to do without words. Maybe Henry didn’t want to be the one to say it first or maybe Bobo was tired of pointing out the obvious. 

He slid out of the booth to sit back on the opposite side where he had all the space he wanted. “Hopefully they’ll remember to bring the lube.”

“Hopefully they will not insist on being in the room,” Henry added. 

\--

God bless the Earps for being equal parts predictable and boring. There was nothing neutral about Shorty’s when it was family-owned, but all the same it at least had something that passed for privacy and a _bed_ that wasn’t made of concrete. 

“Gus is out for the afternoon,” Waverly was saying because nervousness must have made her unable to stop talking, “so we have some time, but I have to start my shift right after this and it usually gets busy in about an hour so…”

She was at the head of a winding trail of people, leading them up the stairs toward the apartment over the bar, right at her back was Wynonna Earp, and then Deputy Marshal Dolls. Bobo was following him up the stairs, eating up the space so quickly it didn’t matter how fast Dolls tried to move, he couldn’t quite get as far away from Bobo as he wanted. At the end of the line, like a turtle with a stolen bottle of whiskey, was John Henry Holliday taking it one stair at a time.

“So Waverly’s not watching,” Bobo said. They were brought to a sharp halt by the door at the top of the stairs. Waverly was fumbling with the lock while Wynonna was shifting on her heels to say something _mean_ and Bobo pulled himself up to press against Dolls back so the next part was whispered right in his ear, “just two tickets then?”

The top of the whiskey bottle hit the stairs in the quiet that followed. Dolls knocked his elbow back against Bobo without a word but Wynonna was glaring at him like something _disgusting_ , “nobody’s watching.”

Waverly pushed the door open and cleared her throat, “ _so_ ,” there was a grocery bag dangling off her arm. “You two,” she motioned at her sister and Dolls, “can just stay right here in the hallway and you two can follow me.”

“Waves,” Wynonna said.

Bobo waved at Wynonna as he slid past her at the top of the stairs. Henry was right after him, tipping the whiskey bottle up one last time with the satisfied sound of a dying man getting one last drink. Then he handed it to Wynonna, “don’t worry about Waverly. He can’t do anything to her now.”

“Not comforting,” Wynonna said. She tipped the bottle up to rinse the whole taste of the idea right out of her mouth.

The room itself was stripped bare to the basics. A frame, a bed, a single curtain left on the rod. There were bits of the kind of trash you find when you’re moving your whole life from one place to another. A single CD on the nightstand. 

“So,” Waverly said. She stuck her arm out with the grocery bag hanging from the very end of her fingers. “Some supplies. Please don’t look in the bag. And I just have to say,” she fumbled with a little slip of paper in her free hand until Henry reached over to take the bag from her. “Alright, so… I think this is ancient Romanian? It looks like ancient Romanian.”

Whatever it was, it was _not_ going to break the curse. But they stood there like good boys, while she waved her hand at them and stuttered over the words from start to finish. 

“Alright,” she said like a squeak, “so, uh-- Just… I’m going to go.” She ran for her life and yanked the door closed behind her. 

“Well thank _God_ ,” Henry muttered. He pulled a second, smaller bottle of liquor out of his back pocket. “I thought that would be _embarrassing_.” He tossed the bag so it landed on the bed so he had both hands to drink as much as he could as fast as he could manage it. He finished a swallow with a hiss and held out the bottle.

Bobo took it because a little bit of liquor didn’t seem like a bad idea. He tipped it up with less desperation than Henry had employed. It felt _appropriate_ at least, the sort of thing you did when you had gotten yourself trapped in a stupid idea. But no amount of drinking was going to make this plan break the curse. “So, what? We just jump on the bed?”

Henry had already pulled his hat off, he was turning it in his hands, running his fingers along the rim while he stared at the bare mattress. He looked stupid in Bobo’s clothes, they were too loose and too tight on him all at the same time. They billowed around his chest, and tightened over the bandages on his wrists. The jeans were too loose at his waist and snug at his thighs. He was running his tongue over his lips, shifting his eyes without moving his head so he was looking at Bobo. 

There was a whole library of words that needed to be _said_ in that space.

But Henry took a step forward to drop his hat on the bedside table and there just wasn’t any time left to say _any_ of them. Bobo hadn’t _expected_ that they would do anything they didn’t have to be observed doing, but Henry’s hands pushed open his coat to settle on his waist. _Henry_ kissed him like they were making a mockery of a stupid idea at that diner. Like they stood a chance of convincing the curse it was _wrong_ about the sort of thing it was. 

(Or maybe that’s just how he kissed. Maybe that’s what was so fucking addicting about Holliday.)

Henry’s hands were pushing up over his shoulders, knocking the coat back, and his palms were following it along, making sure it slid all the way off Bobo’s arms. 

Bobo pulled out of the kiss with a hiss, like he’d been burned, and Henry looked at him with heavy eyes. “This isn’t going to break this curse,” because it _needed_ to be said, because one of them had to be brave enough to say it first.

“Oh, I know,” Henry said. He tightened his hand where it had been resting at Bobo’s wrist and guided it forward. His palm was flat against the back of Bobo’s hand, pressing them one over the other against his thickening cock with a twitch of a smile on his face, saying, “but all the same?”

Well, if there was an _offer_. Bobo dropped the liquor bottle so he could pull Henry’s smirking mouth back up against his. If the last kiss was an echo of a mockery, this one was the first breath of truth ever spoken by John Henry’s lying mouth. He stepped into the kiss, looping his arm around Henry’s back and pressing the heel of his hand against the heat of his cock. The _sound_ that vibrated into his mouth was so deep it almost had a flavor. 

It was everything the curse was _not_ , it spread between them like a breeze, slow and winding. It started at the press of their tongues and it spread down their spines, and coiled up in their stomachs stirring up butterflies that had no business between two grown men. Henry was busy pulling his gun belt off his hips, not putting any of that haste into the way he kept kissing back. When his guns were an echoing thud on the floor, his hands were back at Bobo’s body, pushed under his shirt to run the length of his body from belly to shoulders. 

Everywhere he touched was electric and it had _nothing_ to do with a fucking curse. That was just the way you got touched by this man. He was smiling into the kiss, whispering something smart-ass like, “Bobo I did not know you could _purr_.”

He didn’t _purr_ but there was no use wasting breath _now_. Henry pulled at the shirt his hands were all hung up in so Bobo would lift his arms and let it be stripped off of him. Bobo tightened his fist in the back of the T-shirt Henry was wearing and pulled it up to do the same.

That must have been enough time spent not touching because Henry’s hands were back at his waist, turning him in a circle so his legs were pushed against the bed. They were going to land on it one way or another, so it might as well be _now_. Bobo sat because he didn’t want to be pushed, and Henry smiled at him. 

Any man would have expected to be followed, but Henry took the time to pull off his boots and drop them to the side. Bobo yanked his off so they were meeting up in the middle, with Bobo’s arms wrapped around Henry’s long-lean back to pull him down on the bed. They were laying across it all wrong and it didn’t matter. The grocery bag was caught under Henry’s shoulder, knocking together what passed for supplies according to the Earps but Henry’s hands were pulling at his back to keep him from getting too far away. 

They were kissing like starving men, with Henry rolling himself onto his back. His fingertips were tracing the ridge of the mark where it broke Bobo’s skin and that felt like everything from a hiss of pain to a sweet kiss of comfort all at once. The jeans Henry was wearing were too big to stay on his waist and too tight to be pulled across his ass without being undone first, so they were pulled down to his hip bones like a tease. 

“Maybe,” Henry panted with his head tipped back and Bobo’s hands pulling the button of his jeans loose, “we should see what’s in the bag.” 

“You should look,” Bobo agreed. He tugged at the jeans so they dragged down Henry’s thighs and followed them all the way down to his knees to make sure they got thrown on the floor where they belonged. Henry wasn’t looking at _anything_ but how Bobo was kneeling between his knees and what a _sight_ he was, breathing too hard and turning pink. The only thing he was wearing was the borrowed underwear pulled half-down his legs, and it was a _good_ look for him. 

Henry’s thumb was rough and _soft_ all at once, running the length of Bobo’s lips before resting at the edge of his mouth. He wrapped his legs around Bobo’s chest to pull him back up to where they’d started, kissing like lovers. 

(Maybe Bobo would apologize to Wynonna later. Maybe he’d tell her that he _understood_ now. He would have shot the man stealing this from him too.)

It was Henry’s hands on his belt, working it loose from the buckle, and his body arching up against Bobo with a gathering impatience. It was _his_ hand wriggling into Bobo’s jeans to wrap around his cock, and his smile that was so-damn- _pleased_ at how Bobo groaned at the touch. His lashes brushing against his own cheeks, the flash of his white teeth and pink tongue. “Here I thought that coat was _compensating_ ,” Henry said. 

Bobo pressed their foreheads together, soaking up the feeling of Henry’s hands on him, and the softness of his laugh. “I am going to _fuck_ you.”

“I was beginning to wonder,” Henry said. He pulled his hand free to push Bobo’s jeans down his thighs. 

The bag was trapped under his back, the little bottles and boxes were spread along the mattress. That must have been a hell of a sight in the corner pharmacy: Waverly Earp with her sweet angel face and her arms full of water-based lubrication. Even the old woman at the counter must have taken notice of the outstanding variety of condoms: every size, style, color and flavor they sold in Purgatory. Henry picked up a box to squint at the print proclaiming it to be _strawberry_ flavored and then turned it over twice and dropped it back on the mattress. 

He dug his elbows into the bed to pull himself further onto the bed and pulled his knees up to kick his underwear the rest of the way off. Bobo wasn’t enough of a liar to pretend he hadn’t had more than a few fantasies about fucking the-one-and-only Doc Holliday, but they had never gone quite like this.

No, he didn’t have the imagination to make up these little details, how Henry’s knee felt pressed against his side, how his belly trembled with anticipation, how wet the head of his cock was. How his head fell back when you stroked his thigh, at how _easy_ and _eager_ he was. Bobo couldn’t have dreamed up the heat of his skin, the scratch of his fingers catching at whatever skin they could find. He _had_ imagined what Henry’s body would feel like stretched around his, but not like this. 

Not in time with Henry kissing him again, not with the tune of his encouraging little noises. Not with the shift of his hips, pushing back against Bobo’s fingers stretching him open. 

Bobo couldn’t have imagined this.

But there it was, Henry stretched out beneath him, pulling at his hips to pull him forward. Every motion that brought them together punctuated by a draw of breath, a _moan_ , a breezy little gasp. Henry was _touching_ him, like kissing with his fingertips, skipping from his arms to his chest to his throat to his waist and starting all over again. 

Waverly Earp had simply never been _more_ wrong about anything.

  
  
  



	5. Chapter 5

Whatever it was that the witch had hoped to accomplish with this particular curse, Doc could not help but assume that it was not _this_. While the effects of attempting to separate himself by any measurable distance from Bobo induced the sort of pain that could drive a man crazy (or reduce him to warm chowder), the _other_ side effects were altogether _pleasant_.

One might say _tingly_. 

Doc was _not_ going to ask for any sort of confirmation of his suspicions, but it seemed that Bobo enjoyed being laid on. There was a warmth that seemed to blossom between them, starting in a knot where Doc was laying half on Bobo’s chest, and growing wider and wider with every loop of his finger signing his name across the man’s drying skin. 

Waverly had not been _correct_ in her assumptions and nobody that had any first hand knowledge of witches would have thought she was; but nevertheless something had changed. This warm-and-tingling sensation of mutual satisfaction had not been present between them even this morning. It hadn’t been growing between them at the diner, it hadn’t thread itself into their kissing. It hadn’t even added an extra kick to an excellent fuck.

But it was here _now_.

“I believe it would be in our _best_ interests if you would allow me to do the explaining this time,” Doc said. It may have been a mumble. It may have been a breeze of air over his lips; like the _intention_ to make words that didn’t fully form. 

Bobo’s answer was a snort that made his chest move. His idle hands had been resting on Doc’s back, not doing more than keeping that patch of his skin warm. “Wyatt always said you had a hell of a mouth. Although, I don’t think he was talking about your charming smile.”

It was unfortunate how all nice things did have to come to an end. Doc didn’t even bother sighing, he just rolled away from the seductive comfort of Bobo’s naked skin and threw his legs over the side of the bed. His hands were itching for a smoke, but the only option available to him at the moment was those God-forsaken cigarettes that Bobo kept in his pockets. 

There was, however, a bottle of liquor and it would do about the same in a pinch. He swallowed a mouthful of it while he let the unpleasant coolness of being separate settle back onto his skin. All those nice feelings of bone-deep contentment bled out in seconds, leaving him nothing but a solitary body again. “You know, it would go a mighty long way to making this _partnership_ we have been forced into a more equitable arrangement if you saw fit to tell me exactly _who_ the hell you are,” Doc said.

“Sorry Henry,” Bobo said, “you have to earn that one.” 

The jeans on the floor had the unfortunate quality of looking almost entirely the same. As neither pair had been his choice, it was impossible to tell _now_ which ones he had been wearing. Rather than spending too much time trying to decipher the minute clues, he grabbed the first ones in reaching distance. Bobo was still laying on the bed, spread out like a feast with no inclination to move. “Get dressed,” he said.

Bobo just rolled his eyes, “you’re bitchy when things don’t go your way.” 

Some things were better left unanswered and some things had answers that couldn’t be said when you weren’t able to get farther than three feet from a man. 

\--

It had most certainly been more than an hour since Waverly had run out of the upstairs room as if there were a fire, but the bar did not show any signs of increased livelihood when they reached the bottom of the stairs. Doc had been _hoping_ for a crowd that was sizable enough to draw attention away from their descent down the stairs. He might have even settled for a few _rowdy_ inhabitants over a greater number because either would have provided a sufficient distraction.

Instead, it was a few regulars with gray hair, drinking in corners, a couple of idiots playing a lazy game of pool and the entire elite curse-breaking team of Earps and company staring at him as he reached the bottom of the stairs. Waverly was tucked behind the bar, rubbing an old towel inside a clean glass like she’d been trying to put a hole in it for the past hour. Wynonna was working through a fifth of whiskey with enough rosiness in her cheeks to indicate she’d gotten a running start toward the finish line.

No, it was only Dolls, leaning against the bar at Wynonna’s side that looked at them with sort of emotionless sobriety. 

“I thought I was ready,” Wynonna said to her glass, “you were supposed to get me ready.”

Waverly did not stop wiping the clean glass but she did clear her throat so she could make the attempt to say, “so--uh--do you want a drink?”

(On second thought, Doc should have just stayed in the room letting Bobo ruminate about the sort of rumors that were passed around in the old days. He might have even enjoyed laying there having his past sexual exploits told as jokes. They could have laughed about how Wyatt apparently had a loose tongue on closed-door affairs. If Bobo knew him well enough to know his secrets, he knew Wyatt well enough to know what a bitch he could be when he wanted to.)

Bobo did not answer. Bobo did not even make an attempt to answer. Bobo did nothing but slid his hands into his pockets and look at Doc with a twitch of a satisfied smirk on his face. 

“While I am usually a fan of such libations,” he said mostly at Bobo’s obnoxious face. He only looked away when Bobo looked at Waverly, “I do not believe that will improve the situation we find ourselves in at the moment.”

“So it didn’t work?” Dolls asked. 

“No.” It had not. “I believe we have now _thoroughly_ proven that our meager understanding of the witch’s abilities does not allow us to find a cure and as such, we should now focus our attention on finding said witch and killing her.”

“And you think Bobo,” Wynonna motioned at him with the open end of a half-empty whiskey bottle, “is just going to help us? That he’s what… Just going to lead us to the witch? Isn’t he,” she was grimacing at the taste of the liquor, “the _reason_ this happened?”

Dolls appeared to believe this was the most crucial counter argument to an otherwise excellent plan. He stood there like a man who had managed the impossible feat of having a cake and eating it as well. He was a cat full of cream and canaries. He was _joyful_ as any one sour-faced man could be. 

(And really, if the thought of Doc getting fucked filled him with that much joy, there was definitely a conversation that needed to be had between them about Doc’s present disinterest in pursuing a sexual affair with the man.)

“I mean,” Waverly whispered, “he kind of _has to_ , doesn’t he? If we’ve learned anything over the past twenty four hours it’s that he can’t _help_ but save Doc, right? I mean, right?”

“I do not require saving,” Doc said. He might have appreciated some sense of agreement from the many faces staring at him, but what he got instead was a great deal of quiet staring. “And, _besides_ , it is in Bobo’s best interests to be helpful to our cause. If we find the witch, we can undo the curse and we can all return to doing things in a way that has been working out so well up to this unfortunate point.”

Wynonna was blinking slower than average, frowning at every single one of his words, licking the taste of the liquor off her lips. One of her arms was doing the majority of the work keeping her from laying the bar, but she was waving the other in the air at him. “So, uh, real good dick then?”

“Wynonna!” Waverly shouted.

“What?” Wynonna shouted back. “You wanted to know too.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Could we please,” said Dolls, who was not a voice of reason at all. He was only a voice of assumptions masquerading as a man who did not care, “concentrate on the problem. How are we supposed to find the witch?”

That was a question for which nobody had an answer. They were standing in their almost circle, casting glances to the side, hoping anyone else at all would be the first one to speak. Only nobody had anything worth saying that could be said while they were all wondering about the quality of Bobo Del Rey’s dick. 

Waverly was still trying to shove her fist through the bottom of the glass when she settled on looking at Bobo, and Wynonna (who had been watching Waverly) joined her in looking and Dolls frowned over her shoulder because he was looking too. Doc rolled his eyes because he couldn’t not _look_ and there was the smug bastard with one of his hands raised just far enough to indicate he had something of relevance to say. 

Doc sighed, “yes?”

“He needs permission to talk?” Wynonna’s commentary was not meant to add anything of value to the conversation, but it did sprinkle in a little bit of the ridiculous as necessary.

“I don’t know where the witch is,” Bobo said, “but I know what the witch _wants_.”

“I’m dying of suspense,” Wynonna said.

Bobo’s eyebrows seemed to indicate he would not be upset if the suspense would work faster. Rather than get drawn into that drunken battle of wits, he let an annoyed sort of growl roll across his tongue that made itself into words: “I’ve been digging up the bones of her demon sons for years. She wants them, I have them, and now I’m stuck with Henry.”

“I _hate_ it when I get double crossed by a double crossing witch,” Wynonna said. “Man, if only there was some way to know when someone wasn’t trustworthy.”

“ _Demon_ bones?” Waverly whispered. “Like,” did not seem like it would lead into a theoretical statement, “for instance--just, let’s say, someone had a skull that had...extra teeth?”

“Yeah,” Bobo said like a man who had been digging a very large hole for a very long time only to find out the skull he was looking for was in the hands of his situational enemy. “Like that.”

“You have a skull?” Wynonna asked.

“When did you get a skull?” Dolls asked, “why didn’t you tell us you had a skull with extra teeth?”

“I just got it!”

Bobo was looking at Doc. He was not looking at the ducked heads of his only worthwhile enemies. He was not listening to the ongoing half-drunken argument that was happening. In fact, the longer it went on the less happy about the whole disaster Bobo seemed to get. That irritation was gathering up in his body, making his shoulders hunch round and prominent and his amused mouth go flat. 

“So,” Doc said over the sound of a lot of arguing about whether or not Waverly was an adult capable of making her own choices, “we have something the witch _wants_. What we need now is a plan on how to _use_ that to our advantage.”

“I’m drunk,” said Wynonna to the surprise of nobody. “And you,” she said as she slid off the stool. She was an unhappy drunk, but the sort that had to _touch_ the things she was looking at. Her hands were damp on his face; she was staring mostly at his mouth. “You probably need a nap. I mean, that looks like a _ride_ , am I right? Yeah,” she let her hand slip down so it was pressed against his chest.

Dolls was positively _beaming_ with joy.

Bobo’s hand folded over Wynonna’s shoulder to push her back a step. It was gentle as far as possessive shoves went. Not even hard enough to make her stumble, just enough to make the point that she was too _close_. 

“I’m at work,” Waverly said if just to have something to fill the space.

“Look,” Dolls interrupted, “we take the afternoon, we all come up with a plan, we meet back at headquarters in the morning and we decide what we’re going to do. Waverly, bring the skull with you.”

“Who elected you leader?” Bobo asked.

Dolls smile was very presumptuous for a man with no way of killing revenants. “The badge on my belt,” did sound _exactly_ like something Wyatt might have said. 

Wynonna was still staring at him but it had turned ugly, like she’d been waiting for him to deny the obvious the whole time. He’d seen that face before, that slack-and-hateful method of looking at a man. Wyatt got that look, no matter how many times he found himself disappointed, it was always exactly like the first time. “I need another drink,” she said (mostly to herself).

“Come on, pumpkin,” Bobo said. He didn’t wait for Doc to decide to move on his own but threaded their hands together and pulled him. 

\--

Bobo had said, when asked, that they were going to get the witch’s bones. What he had _not_ felt was important to mention was that the bones were located in a drafty wooden shed surrounded by a dozen grinning revenants. Doc was not the sort of man that would qualify himself as a coward, but he did have at least _some_ trepidation about following Bobo out his truck under the present circumstances.

“They never bothered you before,” Bobo said. He wasn’t hesitating with one hand on the handle and the other gripped around the keys. He certainly wasn’t attempting to make the best of a bad situation, adding, “they aren’t going to touch you, you’re with me.”

No. They weren’t going to lay a hand on him. They were just going to stand there with gaping jaws of disbelief, watching him slide out of the same side of the vehicle as Bobo. They were just going to go through exaggerated stages of recognition as one after another they stared at him long enough to figure out he wasn’t wearing his own clothes. They were slapping one another on the arm, making unsubtle motions in his direction.

Sure, they parted around Bobo like a red sea but they were also smiling at Doc with that precise sort of knowing lasciviousness that pushed it just over the line of what was tolerable. A whistle started up behind him, from the edge of the knot of revenants: a long howl of appreciation. It spread like a series of snorts and chuckles, catching each of them in the ribs. 

Doc was glaring sideways at anyone near enough with the idea of reaching out to touch. The one at the end, skinny with yellow teeth and a trucker hat, winked at him with his lips pushed out in a pucker. All behind him, he could hear the rustle of the group closing. The subtle sounds of a man adjusting himself to a new possibility. 

And it had been one hell of a shitty couple of days. Doc pulled the knife before he’d decided he was going to _have_ to do something. Maybe he was just one semi-immortal man with a knife in a crowd of gun-toting demons, but he would _definitely_ be able to cut this man’s lips off before any of them could shoot him for trying. 

Trucker hat yellow teeth shrieked when Doc grabbed him by the neck. He was squeezing sounds through his bitten lips, trying not to let that knife push any deeper into his flesh as he shoved Doc’s chest with both hands and got _nowhere_. A great snarl of outrage was growing behind him, a chorus of objections and a drumbeat of lifted guns. 

Bobo turned, two feet farther away than he’d been in days. His arms were just hanging at his sides but he’d made himself enough of a monster in the eyes of his _boys_ that they all stepped back. He didn’t say a single word to them, but looked at Doc with a bored tilt of his eyebrow and a flourish of his hand as if to say: _well, do it_. 

Doc let the knife break the skin, let it stretch a bloody line from his chin to the corner of his mouth. It dug into the round of his cheek and the _implication_ that Doc would split that skin straight up to his ear made trucker hat shiver. “Now, in _my_ day, we had respect for our betters. And you should not forget that I _am_ better than _you_.” 

The shivering mass of demon meat caught in his grip was nodding as much as he could manage without slicing open his own face. 

Doc loosened his grip without letting go entirely and wiped the smudge of brown blood on the blade across the skinny man’s dirty coat. He let him go just to watch how quickly he scrambled back. Bobo was smiling at him in a way that would do absolutely nothing but confirm every dirty suspicion of the revenants around them, but he didn’t seem upset in the slightest.

No, he said, “if you’re finished.”

The shed itself was all shadows and dust. There was enough leftover equipment laying around to suggest that work had been done here once. A dirt-caked pan in the corner, a shovel, some work gloves hanging off a nail on the wall. The doors whined when they opened and screamed as they closed. 

Bobo caught him as soon as they were alone inside, reaching over with one lazy hand to grab him by the shirt front and pull him stumbling forward. That kiss was nothing like the ones that had come before. It was all animal lust and promises. 

(What a ride, Wynonna had said and she might have been predicting the future and not telling the past.)

As suddenly as it started, it was gone, and Bobo was licking the taste off his lips as he ducked low enough to grab the rope handle of splintery wooden box. “Some of these,” he said as he crouched down next to the bones laid out like proper skeletons on the tarp, “aren’t even her _boys_. I keep a few in different places in case she decides she is tired of waiting.”

Doc was a few seconds behind current events, still trying to decide how his body felt about that kiss. He wiped his mouth as an afterthought, “what _exactly_ were you planning on trading the witch for these fine sets of bones?”

Bobo made a noncommittal throaty sound.

“Oh,” Doc found a reliable looking post to lean against. The jeans he was wearing were looser than they’d been this morning (or else they weren’t the same ones) but the pockets were plenty big enough to push his fists in. “Is that another one of your _secrets_ that I am not yet trustworthy enough to be privy to?”

Bobo was a fine thing to look at, crouching by a pile of bones. That was the look he wanted, some sort of beast barely held back on a chain. But Doc had written his name on the man’s skin and he knew what was under all that pretense. “Anything I tell you, you’ll use to _your_ advantage as soon as we break this curse. Hell,” he said as he started picking up bones and dropping them into the box, “you might not even wait.”

“I am _flattered_ by your belief in my prowess, but not even _I_ have the means to make a woman forget that I have just gone to bed with her most hated enemy. If you are still worried that there is some feeling between Wynonna and myself, I assure you that any meaningful reconciliation is impossible now.” That was _mostly_ true. Wynonna might forgive him if the curse broke. She might understand it was necessary but she wasn’t just going to _forget_ the things she’d seen. 

No, she wasn’t drinking herself stupid at a bar because Doc was fucking someone else. That look in her eye had started the day before, when Bobo had leaned into her threat and staked his claim on Doc’s soul. Wynonna was drinking to forget that part where Bobo said, _and I’ll take him with me._ Because you didn’t just say that sort of thing to save your own skin.

“The witch has something I want,” Bobo said, “are you going to help?”

“I am helping,” Doc said. He crossed his legs at the ankle, wishing for a decent cigarillo to keep his hands busy, “I am standing guard.”

\--

They were driving (again). Bobo was _annoyed_ the way any man used to having things done for him would be when his authority got questioned. He had been driving and grinding his teeth, making those noises like little growls until all at once, with no prompting at all, he said, “you _really_ don’t know how I am?”

“Should I?” Doc asked. He was taking advantage of the little bit of extra stretch they’d earned on the curse to sit on his own side of the front seat. Not that he wouldn’t have loved to have Bobo’s overly irritated gear shifting fist between his knees. “Did we meet?”

They stopped short at a red light, with Bobo’s angry smile looking like the mask of a real monster. He was laughing at something that wasn’t funny at all. His voice was aiming for humor and managing something that _felt_ like a kick in the gut. “Obviously not.”

That was a lie as sure it was anything. Sitting across this truck seat from him was a man who knew Wyatt well enough to be trusted by the man. A man who knew Wyatt well enough to be privy to _intimate_ secrets, the sort of thing you only told someone you _knew_ wouldn’t share. And the somewhat unconventional nature of those secrets meant the person you were telling them to had similar interests. Bobo was a man that Wyatt had _trusted_ and a man that Doc had _met._ And he could not find anyone at all in his memory that might have fit that description. 

“Well, in my defense, I was probably drunk,” Doc said.

“You were always drunk,” Bobo said. He didn’t guess it. He didn’t agree for the sake of it. He said it like a memory; because he _knew_ because he’d been _there._

“Well, I was also _always_ dying.” That was a point often overlooked. He hadn’t lived a single day of his life (it felt like) not knowing exactly what sort of unfortunate end he was going to meet. All the daring in the world hadn’t found him a single man that was capable of killing him before his body did the job for itself. “Where are we going?” he asked just so they wouldn’t have to talk about _this_ anymore.

Bobo’s answer was a noise, no words, and the jerk of the truck lurching forward at the green light.

\--

Their destination was an apartment which they reached on foot after they left the truck at a convenience store around the corner. The employees of said store had only spared it a tired glance that seemed to indicate they were used to the ugly thing sitting in their parking lot. They carried the box the distance between there and the apartment door.

It was set back into a circle of trees, half-covered in weeds and vines that made it look like another stretch of the wall and nothing like a door. It did not even have a knob, just a series of deadbolts that clicked open when Bobo spun his fingers in a half-circle. The door opened when it was pushed, and they found themselves in a dimly-lit little living room. 

Doc was standing on a reddish-colored rug by the door, feeling as if he had very suddenly been transported into a world that made no sense at all. Bobo dropped his side of the box without a word of warning, and went around him to push the door closed and lock it again. 

A light flicked on. Bobo dropped his keys in a little glass dish on a table by the door. His boots got left by the wall. There was familiarity in the way he moved, a sense of _ownership_ in how he made sure the boots were lined up _just_ right. 

The living room was a couch and the sort of chairs you sank into like a bed. They were arranged around a scratched up little table, half-covered in old books. All along the wall there were mismatched shelves, covered in every sort of reading that a man could get his hands on. The corner was stacked up with piles of old records in crates, there was a dusty player on the shelf in the corner. 

There was a God damn throw blanket draped over one of the chairs. 

Bobo didn’t seem to think some explanation was required because he’d gone down the little hallway without a word. He pulled at the curse until it started to ache, and it was only that lick of pain sneaking up the back of his legs that made Doc set down his half of the heavy ass box and bend over to pull his boots off. Bobo was leaning against the wall when he rounded the corner of the hallway.

“Is this your home?” Doc asked.

Bobo rolled away from the wall, toward the open door that led to a bedroom. It was mostly a bed with an outrageous amount of mismatched pillows. The blankets were rumpled at the end of the bed, the sheets were settled with a fine layer of dust. He had a lamp resting on an overturned barrel and when he reached under the shade to turn it on, it glowed like a little sun making the whole room golden. 

The closet door was open to stacks and stacks of clothes, the sort of wardrobe you got from living too many years stuck in the same moment of your life. There was a little dead plant on the only window in the whole damn apartment. 

Bobo went around the bed to get to the closet, stripping his shirt off as he went. That mark on his back was irritated in soot-gray and fire-orange. But he was digging through the mess of options as if nothing that was happening at the moment required any sort of explanation. As if Bobo were the sort of man that kept a library and house plants. “You could find something that fits you,” he said when the silence got to be too overwhelming.

Doc had met his share of evil men. He might even see one now and again when he looked in the mirror. What he’d never met was a man that was willing to make everyone think he had a soul made of brimstone and fire, who craved being touched and hid all his soft secrets in one dusty apartment. 

“I am only guessing, but I do not suppose anyone knows about this?”

Bobo straightened up again, he was half-facing away and half-looking at him. “They didn’t. Find something that fits you. We have to figure out how to kill a witch.”

The clothes he was wearing did feel wrong on his body. They were all the wrong shape, and the wrong sort. When he moved, they didn’t move with him the way that he expected they would. The jeans shifted and rubbed, and the shirt gaped and billowed. He flattened the ruffled front of the shirt to his body while he figured out exactly what he meant to do.

There was no curse in this small space now. Nothing at all good or bad wrapped around his body. It was all his own doing when he went around the bed, so close to it his thigh was dragging along the edge of the mattress. Bobo was watching him the way you watched a man with a gun. But he didn’t _move_ an inch, he stood and he let it happen. When they were close enough there was no space but body heat between them, Bobo’s eyes were so heavy they were almost closed. His tongue ran across his lips, “you’re not going to like who you find out I am,” like half a confession.

That was alright. Some problems had to wait until you had the information you needed to solve them.

“I do not like you right now,” Doc said. It was just a little bit of a lie; just enough of one that it made Bobo snort. That glow was warming up, like a little fire, starting where Doc’s hand was hovering over Bobo’s back. They weren’t even touching, but all the same, there it was. 

“Maybe,” Bobo said, not so different than how he’d tried protesting back in that bare room above the bar, “we should have brought that bag with us.” 

“There are a variety of other activities we…” He had more words to arrive at the same point, but Bobo wrapped an arm around his shoulders to pull him forward. They were kissing like fools, like they didn’t have things that _needed_ to get done. 

Doc’s hands slid up Bobo’s back, across the low seams of that mark on his back, to wrap around his shoulders from underneath. He thought, like a bubble popping in the air, that maybe all of Wynonna’s side-long stares and disappointed frowns had some sort of truth in them. Maybe he ought to have been the first one to have the thought, but how, really, he didn’t mind taking his time catching up. 


	6. Chapter 6

There were things that Robert had _longed_ for during his brief and disappointing life. He’d hoped for a family and a home. He’d daydreamed about finding someone that brought him a feeling of _belonging_ and contentment. 

Hell had burned the idea of simple pleasures out of his bones. Bobo had come back filled up with that unanswered hunger. No amount of violence had ever brought him a moment’s peace but that hadn’t stopped him from _trying_ to figure out what would. 

Constance had given him the answer, whether she meant to or not, because Bobo hadn’t felt _contentment_ since Robert was still young enough to sit in his mother’s lap. He hadn’t felt anything that might have been called solace since the last time his father had hugged him when he left home. 

Oh Robert’s parents had been exactly like the man himself, full of quiet hope of better things. They’d wished their son the best when he walked out of their house and headed out west to a world of _possibilities_. He’d written them letter after letter as he tried hard to find a place for someone like him in the world he found there. Their words had been constant encouragement but they were only words.

But this, Doc sleeping stretched out across the length of his bed? The memory of his hands resting so gently and so kindly on Bobo’s skin? The last lingering taste of his skin still fading off the surface of Bobo’s tongue? 

There was a warm glow set into his gut that had nothing at all to do with sex and everything to do with the fucking curse that had grown like a cancer between them. At first it had been a hindrance and that must have been what the witch had planned. That they would kill themselves with trying to force themselves apart. Or that they would be killed by their feuding allies just for the crime of being seen together. 

Constance didn’t have enough _imagination_ to think that the curse would have turned out like this. She couldn’t have known how cruel it would be; how it gave Bobo the idea of something he had no hope of ever having.

He couldn’t stay there another minute, laying on his side, watching Doc sleep without a single-second of worry over his own safety. 

\--

Bobo had become accustomed to the layer of dust that was frequently settled over the whole of his apartment. He’d gotten used to the dreariness of the gray fuzz that almost never seemed worth the time it would take him to clear away. It grew thickest on things he used the least. Any man with even a moderate eye for observation could easily pick out his favorite things among the shelves and boxes full of things he had stashed here.

Henry was, regardless of how Bobo wished he didn’t have to admit it, marginally more observant than most. He’d already taken his time about cataloguing the things he’d seen when they first arrived. He’d crouched (naked) by the closet sorting out piles and piles of clothes to find something he was willing to wear.

And now he was standing in the living room, clutching a glass of water to his chest like it was a decanter of whiskey, making slow faces at the bookshelves. He wasn’t _touching_ anything, but it felt a half-breath too intimate to be examined so closely. “This definitely sheds light on a side of you that I would not have, prior to being here, assumed you had. Was Robert an educated man?”

Bobo had dragged the crate of bones into the center of the room so he could sit on the couch and crack it open. The couch had whined about accepting his weight and the hardly-used cushions sagged under him. It was hoping for too much to think that it might have lasted him a few more years. (It had already lasted the better part of two decades.) “Are you insinuating that I am _not_ an educated man?”

Henry snorted at the implication. “I _have_ seen the trailer park. If there was ever a better, more thorough display of balls over brains, I have not seen it.”

Bobo was holding the femur of a demon in one hand, resting the other along the bony curve of his knee, watching Henry turn on his heels so they were looking at one another. He couldn’t be a normal man that sat quietly in a chair and asked relevant questions about what their plan was. No, he had to be occupying his half of the short space they’d managed to make between them smiling at him like he was just _waiting_ for a rebuttal that challenged his wit.

“Careful,” Bobo said, “if you keep talking like that, I might think you’re going soft, Henry.”

“Perish the thought,” Henry said, but he was still smiling as he stepped over to stare down into the wooden box. “Who am I looking at?”

“Constance Clootie’s demon sons. I’ve been digging them up for years. She’s got some idea that if she finds all of the bones she can bring them back. Only, your buddy Wyatt cut them into such little pieces I don’t we can find all the bones.”

“Wyatt?” Holliday repeated. He seemed to find _that_ especially funny, but he settled himself into a crouch as he leaned over to pick up a long arm bone. It was thin enough it could have been snapped in half with minimal effort. “That does not seem like something my dear friend would involve himself in? Wyatt did not believe in demons and he was not the sort of man to worry about concealing his crimes.”

“ _Regardless_ ,” Bobo cut in before they could waste any of their time on Wyatt Earp, “finger bones are hard to find in a hundred years worth of dirt.”

Henry laid the bone back into the box and nodded his head. “So we have something the witch is desperate to find. We lay a trap, we provide this as bait, and she is _sure_ to show her ugly face. But,” he stood as he spoke, “what I find to be my most _pressing_ and _immediate_ problem is that I am _famished_ and your enlightening little home does not have one single ounce of food.”

“Your stomach is not more important than our freedom.”

While most of Holliday’s wardrobe consisted of button downs and well-fit vests. He was wearing a T-shirt made of the sort of material that clung to your body. It fit him better than it had ever fit Bobo, because it molded itself around the impossible leanness of his belly. It stretched across his shoulders in such a way it was painted over the muscle and bone. His disbelief was an innocent gasp of noise and the almost unnoticeable twist of his fingertips into the butter-soft cotton of his shirt. It pulled up just enough to show a sliver of his soft, white skin above the tight-fit of his gun belt. 

Maybe there was the faint outline of teeth marks just there, a pinkish-bruise on that pale belly flesh. 

“You will have to forgive my assumptions,” said a man who had never been sorry a moment in his life, “my stomach did seem _so_ important to you only last night.”

“Put your shirt down,” before they forgot what they were doing, “I’ll get you breakfast on the way to the police station.”

Henry’s smile was smugness and it should have been _infuriating_.

\--

To say that John Henry Holliday was out of date would be a colossal understatement. Bobo was willing to concede (if an argument ever took place) that they were technically the same age. However, Bobo had spent the majority of the past century topside, growing with the modern world and therefore had some idea of the joy and drawbacks of modern convenience.

For instance, Bobo understood the value of fast food. He understood the many varied applications of a quick bite to eat. And he understood that in these modern times, (not so differently from the times Henry remembered) every man was most interested in himself. As such, any modern man who had food purchased for him knew that he was better off saying thank you and eating what he was given.

“What is this?” Henry said as he pulled the sandwich out of the bag. He was holding it with his fingertips like it might contain something dirty or explosive and either way he did not want to have to wash it off his hands. He turned it over twice and lifted it delicately to his nose to sniff at it. 

“It’s bacon, eggs and a biscuit.”

“Eggs?” Henry said like he didn’t believe it for a minute.

“And cheese.”

“Cheese?”

Bobo growled and Henry looked over at him with the softest and most pleased smile ever seen on his face. He dropped his sandwich back into the bag and made a show out of looking out through the dusty windshield at the doors to the station.

“Should we go in?”

Not just yet. Bobo needed to finish thinking fondly about all the better uses for Henry’s smug mouth. He needed to calm himself and _prepare_ for what was sure to be another fantastic waste of his time, being stared at by a bunch of deeply-offended morons acting as if there weren’t a 45% chance that Henry would have eventually had sex with him even without a curse. “Am I allowed to talk to them today?”

“That depends on whether or not you intend to antagonize our allies. I greatly prefer people to have fond feelings for me if we are to enter into any sort of arrangement in which my life depends on another. Some of us are only immortal under specific circumstances.”

If a hundred and thirty years at the bottom of a well hadn’t killed Henry it didn’t seem like much of anything would. But, Bobo rolled his eyes, “I’ll do my best. For _you_.”

\--

The box was significantly heavier than it looked so it helped that John Henry was significantly stronger than _he_ looked because not a single man or woman among the BBD crowd so much as flinched from the spot they were standing in to help. 

Not that they were all standing, Wynonna was half-sitting and half-slumped onto a desk and Waverly was anxiously shifting her weight from one foot to another. She had all the manic energy of a very small dog, all but shivering visibly as she watched them walk in. They hadn’t even fully set the box down before Waverly was blurting out, “so? Any change?”

Holliday was not going to address the question when he could just pluck the sack of his breakfast sandwiches off the top of the box and set his ass on the edge of the desk. One of his feet was resting on the top corner of the stupid box as he made a great show that produced a papery cacophony of sound as he freed his breakfast from the sack. When he looked up from folding back the waxy paper to take note of how everyone was staring at him, he made a mockery of innocent confusion.

“New underwear, same curse,” Bobo said before anyone could start wasting their time.

Dolls looked like he was on the verge of having a stroke. It wasn’t a strange look for someone as uptight as Dolls to have, but it was a little bit of an overreaction nonetheless. Here they were, supposed to be finding a way to capture and kill the witch, and there Dolls stood with one arm crossed over his chest and the other halfway in the air just _staring_ at Doc Holliday biting into a breakfast biscuit.

While the sight of Henry eating seemed to be rare enough to deserve disbelief, it wasn’t going to get them anywhere.

“Nothing?” Waverly whispered, “not even a teeny, tiny little bit of a difference?”

“Waves,” Wynonna gasped, “fucking didn’t help, okay? You can stop asking. They’re still cursed, and now they’re doing drive through breakfast runs? Ok? We all just need to accept the curse because these two,” and she hissed those words like they were the biggest insult of them all, “obviously have.”

Henry’s answer was an ongoing crinkle of paper being gently rolled back so he could bite into the sandwich with ease.

“What can I say,” Bobo could definitely refrain from saying, “good fucks are hard to find.”

Wynonna’s hand was resting on Peacemaker sitting on the desk at her side. The sneer on her face was the very same it had always been but with an added glare of pure, unadulterated hatred that came from that special jealous place in a woman’s body. “Oh I am really going to enjoy sending you back to hell.”

Bobo blew her a kiss.

“Can we please focus?” Dolls snapped at them all. (Even if the only thing he’d been focusing on was Henry happily eating his sandwich.) “I assume this box has something to do with the witch.”

“This box has everything the witch wants,” Bobo said. He bent low enough to pull the lid open and knock Holliday’s foot off the top of it. Dolls peered at the collection of bones like it was _boring_ (and bones, as a general rule, were boring). “Now I have provided the bait, I expect that you have come up with a trap?”

No, he didn’t. Henry was balling up the paper from his sandwich while Dolls drew in a breath to start talking. Only he couldn’t _possibly_ start saying anything while there was the noise of paper being rolled. No, he waited.

And waited.

And waited a bit longer as Henry shoved a single fist into the bag to get his other sandwich.

“Please,” Dolls said when the noise came to a momentary halt, “take your time.”

“That is very kind of you Deputy Marshal. I admit I am famished.” Henry didn’t even rush himself through folding the paper back. 

“We’re going to need salt,” Waverly said, “that’s the only way to really trap a witch.”

“I’m going to need another drink,” Wynonna whispered to nobody.

“I think we’re going to need a slightly better plan than just salt, Waverly,” Dolls said. “I assume that she knows that you have these?”

Bobo did not understand why he had to answer obvious questions. But he nodded his head.

“So what we need to do is put them somewhere the witch thinks she can get to them without anyone knowing…”

“I like Waverly’s idea,” Doc said. “The witch is _obviously_ aware that we are in possession of the bones of her sons as she has tasked Bobo with unearthing them. We simply fill the box with salt and leave it somewhere the witch is sure to find it, and when she comes along we shoot her. Is there a particular bullet that is most effective for witch killing?”

Waverly looked like she was going to cry. “No?”

Dolls had his hand folded over his mouth.

“Well,” Wynonna said from across the room, “sounds like the best plan we’re going to get. Waves and I will get the salt.”

“That’s not…” Dolls said with bone-deep futility, “that’s not even a plan.”

The rivalry between Henry and Dolls had made sense when Holliday was standing between Dolls and the woman he wanted to stick his dick in. The curse (and by extension Bobo) had removed that element but Dolls still turned to sneer at Henry (and his shit-eating grin) like they had anything worth fighting over. 

Henry made it so far as opening his mouth to speak before Dolls scoffed at him.

“Just don’t. Just, whatever made-up old-timey advice you are about to say… Just don’t. We’ll shoot the witch if that’s what you want.” He looked from Doc to Bobo, “and maybe we won’t stop there. And when it’s done,” he looked back at Henry, “everyone will know the truth about everyone.”

Henry eased to his feet because he was a man for which there had never been a challenge issued he wasn’t going to meet. His smile was as satisfied as a Sunday morning, almost painted in the very same pastel colors. His hands were resting on his guns with his elbows pointed back from that long-lean line of his body. “Well not _everyone_. Unless you are insinuating that shooting the witch will reveal your dependency on an unknown drug? I, for one, believe we could all use a little good-ole fashion honesty around this particular campfire.”

Bobo pinched the bridge of his nose, “Henry are you trying to fuck this guy?”

“Gracious me,” Holliday said as he looked back over him without a single ounce of shock. “It is not _my_ eyes that cannot stop lingering lavishly upon _his_ delicious body, Bobo.”

“My eyes are not _lingering_ on you. That’s not lust,” Dolls whispered, “that’s disgust.”

“I have been looked at in every way a man can possibly be gazed upon, Dolls. I am very familiar with the difference between _disgust_ and _interest_. The way you have been looking at me tells me you are _deeply_ interested. However,” and Henry took a step back like he was giving the man space to be an _obvious_ liar, “some men are not capable of facing up to these difficult truths.”

Bobo was grinning and he saw no particular reason that he shouldn’t. In fact, he saw no particular reason why he should lay his arm over Henry’s shoulders and pull him in to kiss him. Henry must not have seen any good reason why he should lean back into the kiss. Why his hand shouldn’t push into the overheated space between the coat and Bobo’s back. 

Dolls answer was a snarl of something he _wanted_ to be revulsion. “I’ve got work to do.”

\--

BBD headquarters were as dull as a patch of dead grass when it was only Henry and him left in the room. While Henry seemed content enough to lay back into the reclining chair with his feet on the desk and his hat perched over his eyes, Bobo had never been a fan of four walls. Certainly not four walls made mostly out of concrete designed to keep bad men inside of them. 

“Bobo, if I did not know better I would say that you are _nervous_.” Doc hadn’t moved at all, not even drawn in a breath big enough to string together that many words. He certainly hadn’t been watching Bobo as he leaned against the wall by the windows so he could watch the world outside.

“Bored. Having a little trouble believing this is my opposition. Not nervous.”

“They do not _have_ to be your opposition.” Henry didn’t so much as lift the hat away from his face. He didn’t flinch a finger from where they rested on his chest. He was perfectly at ease, as if a man offered the impossible every day.

“Sorry, Henry, you’re not that good of a fuck.” (But he was.) “Wynonna would never work with me.”

“Well,” Henry’s voice filled up with something like a clever smile, “that is because Wynonna has been laboring under a misconception about your identity. You see, I have wasted a considerable amount of energy trying to recall your face among the _many_ unfortunate criminal types that met their end by Wyatt’s hand. It has caused me unrest,” and he did pull his hat off his face then so he could look over at Bobo. “That I have been unable to recall your face. Especially when it is obvious that we knew one another in our previous life.”

“And?” Bobo prompted, “did you figure it out?”

“Oh yes,” Henry promised, “after your apartment, I thought to myself, perhaps I should not be attempting to recall a _criminal_. Wyatt tried very hard to be a good man, but that did not mean he wasn’t responsible for the death of any number of other good men. And that’s when I remembered a nervous-mannered man, who became very important to dear Wyatt just before the mission that resulted in all of us being in our present condition.”

Bobo didn’t know, in the last second between words, if he _wanted_ to hear his name spoken or _not_. He didn’t have enough time to work out how he felt about it, because Henry was looking right at him, and he couldn’t even give a man a full breath to prepare himself. 

“Robert.”

Henry didn’t just _say_ it. He rolled the word across his tongue like it was a taste he enjoyed. He looked at Bobo like he was offering something that neither of them was in any position to give. They weren’t lovers by choice, but because of a curse. It didn’t matter how convincingly Henry touched him when they were alone, or how Bobo wanted to kiss him now. They were here because of a witch. Who knew what would happen as soon as she was dead.

“Congratulations,” Bobo said.

“You were there when the curse was set.”

Yes he was.

“That makes you uniquely qualified to be of use to Wynonna and her associates in their quest to break said curse,” Henry continued, “and perhaps if you were to be useful to her in her attempts, there might be a chance for peace between you.”

Bobo snorted, “Wynonna’s never going to trust me. Not even you can make promises like that, Henry. We’ll find the witch, and we’ll kill her and we’ll all go back to who we were before this started.”

Henry snorted at that. He didn’t protest, but leaned back in the chair again. “Believe what you need to believe, Robert.”

\--

Wynonna came back sweat-soaked and angry. She barely made it through the door before she was glaring at Bobo as if the whole damn scenario was his fault. (It might have been somewhat his fault since he did deliver Henry to the witch. However, he couldn’t have known that he'd end up cursed to occupy the same room as him for eternity.) Even Waverly was trailing far enough behind Wynonna to indicate it was better not to be near her.

“Next time I volunteer to go do something stupid like buy bulk sized salt bags, remind me they’re really fucking heavy.” Every word was directed at nobody entirely, but still felt as if it was meant to be an insult to everyone.

“The man at the store…”

“I don’t need a man’s help,” Wynonna snapped back. She huffed a sigh with her hands on her hips, “well? Why are you just sitting there. We’ve got the box, we’ve got the salt. Let’s go find a field.”

Dolls had come out of his office at the sound of the door being kicked open. He looked more annoyed _now_ than he had when Henry was purring lascivious suggestions into his face. “We can’t actually leave the box in a field. She’ll know it’s a trap.”

“So?” Wynonna asked.

“She won’t care that it’s a trap,” Bobo said. He was leaning against the desk not too far from where Henry was still doing a credible job pretending to nap. The stretch of the curse had narrowed just slightly after he rebuffed the man’s idea. Apparently, Henry didn’t like having his daydreams crushed. “She’s been waiting for these bones for a century. She thinks she’s too clever to get caught in a trap.”

“Well, is it a trap?” Waverly whispered from behind her sister. “It’s not a very good one. How do we even know that shooting her will hurt her? And didn’t she make a deal with Doc? I mean, what if Doc can’t hurt her?”

“Okay,” Wynonna all but shouted, “do we have a plan or not? All I’m saying is whatever we do better involve a _shit ton_ of salt or someone owes me money and the last hour of my life back.”

Doc lifted his hat away from his face to say, “put the box in a barn if a field will not suffice. As Bobo has said, it does not matter where the box is placed nor how _obvious_ a trap it is. Once the witch is aware that we have what she wants, she will not be able to keep herself from coming for it.”

Dolls made a noise like he’d been kicked in the balls.

Waverly was _trying_ to be polite and it certainly pained her, because she whispered, “history was so kind to you.”

“Right,” Wynonna said over all other sounds, “do you have a spare barn somewhere, _Bobo_? The sooner we kill the witch the sooner we can all get back to normal.”

Bobo had several barns including the one where he’d been keeping the bones prior to moving them. However, there was a much simpler solution that had not yet occurred to any of the occupants of the room. “I have a barn _and_ I have the witch’s phone number. All _I_ need to do is call her and offer an exchange and she’ll show.”

Henry dropped his feet off the desk (finally) to cover the sound of his smirking. All through the bond between them it felt like bubbles popping, the way a giggle might have felt if it got under your skin. “That is a fantastic idea. We need only call the witch and profess our most sincere wish to be separated in exchange for the bones and with the addition of Waverly’s skull.”

Wynonna had never looked closer to actually shooting him in the brief time they’d known one another. She ran her tongue across her lips as she shifted her body so she was facing Doc fully and leaned into his space to say, “if you say _one more_ word, I will shoot you.”

Doc’s smile certainly didn’t secure his safety.

“Alright,” Wynonna said, “I will follow you to the barn, you can fill the box with salt. Waverly can go get her skull. Dolls I don’t know, I’m out of things that need doing for this _genius_ plan.” She snapped her fingers before any more words could be said and turned toward the door.

\--

“You know,” Henry said as he stood to the side of the dusty wooden box full of bones, doing absolutely nothing to help fill it with salt, “there is the possibility that this will not work. I am no expert on curses, but this one does feel…”

Bobo shook the bag of salt he’d carried out of the truck (by himself) and ripped open (by himself) and poured over the bones (by himself) until the last grains of salt were out. He threw the empty sack to the side as he straightened up. There was more than enough time for Henry to finish his thought, but he wasn’t going to say what they both knew was true. 

“Yeah,” Bobo said. “I guess we’ll just have to be satisfied with killing the witch.”

Henry smiled so brightly in the dim shadows of the barn that someone might have thought the sun was rising in the walls. “I would be more than satisfied with killing the witch. However, once the deed is done we will need to reach some sort of agreement about how we plan to proceed and which side of the fight we are planning on being on.”

“Well, if you’re going for the winning side, statistically speaking, the Earps are losers.” Bobo hoisted the last bag of salt off the ground by Henry’s feet and held there until the man cut it open. 

“Any side I’m on becomes the winning side, Robert. What I am asking you is, wouldn’t you prefer to find a way to end the Earp curse rather than being the _end_ to the curse?”

There were a lot of things Bobo wanted, but what he wanted _most_ out of this miserable world was the ability to leave the shitty triangle he’d been trapped in since Wyatt shot him. Constance had complicated his life by tying him to Doc, and even if they weren’t ready to go around telling everyone that this thing binding them together had settled into their bodies like it had become part of their bones, it was true. Killing Constance wasn’t going to change anything, the best they could hope for was some _explanation_ as to what the curse was.

Doc Holliday wasn’t going to side against an Earp; there was no chance that he would have. Regardless of his bold talk and his questionable actions, when it came down to it Wynonna was as safe with Doc as Wyatt had been. That meant Bobo faced an eternity of fighting against a force or nature or a brief tenure in hell-on-earth putting up with people that hated him.

“One thing at a time, Henry,” Bobo said. 

The first thing was finishing pouring the salt.

The second was Waverly walking into the barn carrying the very skull Bobo had been digging up half of Purgatory looking for. She held it between her palms like it was nothing-at-all important. Almost as if she were more upset to be giving it up than she was to find out it belonged to a demon. “So where should we put it? On the box? In the box? Do we need to sprinkle it with salt?”

“I believe it will be just fine sitting on the top of the box,” Henry said. “That way the witch will see it and believe we are sincere in our offer to trade these bones for our freedom from one another.”

Waverly set the skull down on the box so softly someone might have thought it was made of spun sugar and not bone. She kept staring at it, almost frowning, as she stood up straight again. 

“Bobo if you would be so kind as to--” Henry started to say.

Waverly looked at Bobo, not Doc, with an expression so sad it was almost regret. It was sadder than she’d managed to look about any of those _cures_ she tried out on them. Sadder than he’d seen her since she was a child asking why her Father couldn’t love her. “But you can’t get free from one another, can you?”

“Probably not,” Bobo said.

“The phone call,” Doc prompted.

“Sorry, can’t keep the missus waiting.” 

Waverly just rolled her eyes. “Right. I’ll wait outside with Wynonna. But just for the record? I think this is a shitty plan and if anyone gets hurt, it’s because of you two.”

Henry was frowning at him as Waverly left, looking almost convincingly offended. “I am not your missus. That is another thing we will have to discuss if you intended to continue to introduce me as a person of some significance to you. _Missus_ ,” he hissed at nobody.

Bobo pulled the phone out of his pocket, “wifey? Ball and chain? Life partner? Buddy? Partner?”

“Make the damn call,” Henry said, “let us kill a witch so that we can move onto more important tasks.”

Bobo might not have been smiling, but not even as annoyed as Doc sounded was worth more than how settled and how _comforting_ the bond was between them. Maybe that was part of the curse or maybe it was just them, but it felt _good_. He was smiling at the phone as he scrolled through the contacts until he found Constance’s number. It was just barely ringing when he lifted it to his ear. “Old lady? Little woman?”

“How long would it take for your dick to grow back if I cut it off?” Henry asked.

Bobo smirked as the phone kept ringing.


	7. Chapter 7

Bobo had taken up a place against the far wall of the barn; any other man might have assigned it a strategic choice as it allowed a clear view of the door. But Doc had the suspicion that it was motivated primarily by being the only post in the barn that was clean and free of nails poking out through the splintering wood. Bobo was crouching with his back pressed against the wall, rubbing his thumb and finger together as he made low, almost noises in his throat. 

Doc had spent a hundred and thirty years waiting in a well and it had done _nothing_ to improve his patience. Standing here now, waiting for the witch to get dolled up enough to come and face them was taxing enough, but waiting for Bobo to work around to saying whatever he was turning over in his brain was somehow _more_ aggravating. 

“Fine,” Bobo said like he was doing Doc a favor, “if Wynonna’s willing, we can try it your way. But, when it goes to shit, we’ll do it mine.”

A braver man would have said that Bobo’s method of getting things done was shit enough without Doc’s help. He’d had a hundred years to figure out how to get out of the Ghost River Triangle and the curse in general and the most he’d accomplished was digging up bones for a bitchy witch that couldn’t be trusted. Still, if it was important to the man’s pride, Doc was willing to pretend like Bobo had a valid idea. “Of course,” he agreed, “that being the case I suggest we find an apartment with a knob on the front door and perhaps a proper window.”

“Anything else?” Bobo prompted, “jacuzzi tub? Breakfast nook?”

“If you are offering…”

Bobo just snorted. “Whatever makes you happy.”

That was an aspect of the curse they would need to discuss more thoroughly when they had time and real privacy. How it seemed to stretch when they were at ease with one another and how tight and contracted it got when there were bad feelings. They trusted one another just enough to get a full ten feet away from one another, but he expected with a little effort they could _expand_ that space. “I will be your excuse,” Doc offered, “a wonderfully convenient reason why you _must_ maintain a proper domicile and since I am known to be…”

“Prissy?” Bobo offered.

“ _Particular_. It will serve as a reason that we must have nice things. I require all manner of comfort, as you well know.” If Bobo enjoyed being surrounded by those nice things, in a space devoid of guns and rusting metal, well nobody would ever know except the two of them. “Did the witch give an indication of what time she was planning on gracing us with her presence?”

Bobo’s answer was pressing both of his hands over his face and snarling a sound into his palms. And then he was standing again, so suddenly it seemed to rock his balance slightly off center. “I didn’t ask,” he said, “did you have something else to do?”

Doc put his hands up in surrender before an innocent question could begin an unwanted argument.

\--

Truth was, despite what Dolls, Wynonna or Waverly thought of the plan, the most basic fact of the matter was that the witch would come because she _had_ to. They had the thing she desired most in all the world and _nothing_ so small as the idea that it may be a trap was going to stop her. 

Still, it was one thing to know the trap would work and another to be idly smoking when it _did_. Constance expended precious energy making a _showy_ entrance, kicking open both doors at the same time. The wind blew in with her as if there needed to be any more _drama_ in this moment. Her face was pinked from the chill but her smile was lipstick red and bleached white. 

“Oh boys,” she sighed at them, “oh boys, oh _boys_. Was this your plan? To ambush me in a,” she looked around like a witch as old as she had any right to be particular about her surroundings, “drafty barn? I’m afraid your friends aren’t going to be very helpful. Now don’t worry,” she rushed on without leaving a single space for them to so much as breathe, much less start to worry, “they’re all alive _for now_. And they can stay that way, as long as you give me what I want.”

Bobo had his arms crossed over his chest and his feet spread apart because this moment really needed more macho grandstanding. He cocked up one of his eyebrows like he was _unimpressed_ down to the bones. “They’re no friends of mine,” he said, “so how about you tell me and Henry here how to get rid of the curse? And _then_ we’ll talk about whether or not you get the bones.”

Constance’s laugh was absolutely angelic. It was as sweet sounding as church bells on Christmas morning. Her fingers were delicately dancing in the air. It was a fine act of showmanship, Doc couldn’t deny that. Her eyes slid over Bobo’s body like a tongue, but they went wide as her musical laugh turned almost manic. There was _actual_ joy in the sound of it as she jerked her head to look at Doc. “I’m sorry boys,” she wheezed through the laughter. “I really underestimated you, John Henry. I had heard the rumors--especially after you went missing, about how _indiscriminate_ you were about your bed partners but I _never_ would have guessed that you’d _actually_ have sex with…” Her hand waved dismissively at Bobo.

Well, it was about time they put Waverly’s worry to the test. Doc didn’t even pull the cigarillo away from his mouth before he drew his gun. The witch barely had time to recognize the sound of the gun being cocked before he shot her. Just in case it was the sort of thing that might be fatal to himself, he aimed for her shoulder. There was an unpleasant burn that bore into his own skin but it was nothing at all like _death_. 

The witch screamed as Bobo’s whole body flinched in reaction to the noise. 

“Henry!” Bobo shouted at him.

The witch had been knocked sideways by the bullet in her shoulder. Doc cocked the gun again and pressed it against her face before she got any ideas about trying out any kind of magic on them again. 

“You can’t kill me,” Constance hissed at him, “you’d be killing yourself.”

“I was alerted to that very possibility, which is why I took the precaution of bringing a friend. Now,” he pressed the gun into the rise of her cheekbone so she instinctively took a step backward and that put her exactly next to the box of salt. 

He didn’t even so much as utter the word before Bobo stepped up behind her and kicked the sagging planks at the side of the box. They cracked under the strain of so much salt, spilling forth a great white mountain that seared into the witch’s flesh as soon as it touched her.

Her scream was as beautiful to him as any music he had ever heard. The salt covered her feet up to her ankles. It was spread so thick around her that she couldn’t escape it. “What have you done?” she screamed at him.

Doc took a step back and though it _pained_ him deeply, he slid the gun back into the holster. “You were explaining why it matters that I had sex with Bobo?” He had lost his cigarillo between shooting her and the salt fall, which was a shame when he had been enjoying it.

“It made the curse permanent!” Constance shrieked at him. “Get me out of this salt!”

“Waverly’s going to be so upset when she hears that,” Bobo mumbled behind Constance. “Although, I did have an inkling that might have happened.”

“And do you have whatever it is that you have been using as leverage against my…” Doc did not have a word that described Bobo. Well, he had many words but none of them that seemed appropriate for the moment. In fact, most of the obvious ones seemed almost insulting.

Bobo was smirking just behind Constance’s back as he slid a hand into her pocket and pulled out a very sharp knife. “Where’s the _lead_?” Bobo growled when the silence went on longer than he cared for. 

Constance pushed her hair away from her face. Her tongue ran across her lips. “That wouldn’t have worked anyway,” she said very quickly, “there is no way to break the Earp curse. At least no way that I’ve been able to figure out. You should have finished what you started when you set out to kill my husband, _Robert_.”

“So you do not have it?” Doc said.

“No,” Constance said softly, “that doesn’t mean I can’t be useful to you.”

Bobo had been looking at the knife in his hand for almost all of the conversation. He tapped the point of it against the flat of his palm, tap-tap-tap as Constance spoke. The wood around them was starting to shiver as the nails in the walls quivered under the pull of Bobo’s aggravation. When he looked up, his smile was all hell and no forgiveness. His eyes were dark at the edges but they hadn’t gone _red_. 

Constance was opening her mouth to make an offer that they were sure to turn down, her lipstick mouth parted with a little smack as her fingertips dusted her hair away from her face. She realized too late that there was simply nothing left she could _possibly_ say that would save her life. The knife stabbed into her chest with such force, the sound of her cracking ribs was a wet snap echoing in the room. Her last sound was a shriek of shock; her face turned from smugly smiling at Doc to gaping in surprise at Bobo. One of her hands had dropped down to grab his wrist but the blood was seeping around the wound that surely went straight through her heart. 

“I know exactly where your husband is buried, Constance. I dug him up years ago,” Bobo whispered. He twisted the knife a half-turn before he pulled it out. It was dripping wet as he shifted on his feet so he was facing Doc. The tip of the knife bounced in the air. “I’m buying the bar,” he said, “there’s an apartment upstairs.”

“The bar?” Doc repeated. “Shorty’s? I was under the impression that the lovely woman named Gus owned that bar.”

“Lovely woman?” Bobo repeated. “The way I’ve heard it, she hates you.”

Doc reached into his coat pocket to pull out his handkerchief and passed it over to Bobo so he could wipe the blade clean before the blood splattered anywhere else. Constance hit the ground in a wet thump, scattering the grains of salt even farther across the musty old hay on the ground. “I admit she does not care for me personally, but I have heard it say that she is generally a lovely woman.”

“I’m buying it from her,” Bobo finished wiping the knife and held the handkerchief back out like Doc was going to want it back. He seemed to understand that there was no good way to clean that level of blood out of white cotton so he balled it up and threw it to the side with the witch’s body. “You’ve been in the apartment. Waverly used to live there.”

“Yes, I have seen it,” Doc said. He motioned at the salt pile being slowly turned pink by the slow spread of blood. “Should we gather up the bones?”

“I’ll send the boys out to get them,” Bobo said. He didn’t seem to know what he wanted to do with the knife, so he just kept waving it in the air as he spoke. 

Doc rubbed at the sore place on his shoulder that had started aching more pronounced and heated than it had at the start. “Well, we should go and check on the others. Heaven knows what the witch has done to them.”

Bobo rolled his eyes but he followed after Doc when he started walking. 

\--

At first glance, a man could be forgiven for assuming that he had happened across a dead body. Wynonna had the look of a woman that had been shot down, lacking any sort of purpose or art to how she’d landed face-up on the snow. Her legs were kicked out at odd angles. Her arms were over her head. Her hair had blown into her face with a generous dusting of snow gathering over where the steam from her breath accumulated. The only _real_ signs of life was the unholy snoring that rattled out of her petite chest like a whole gathering of unhappy bears snarling in unison. 

Peacemaker had fallen as well. It was in it’s own dent in the snow, a foot or so away from Wynonna’s lax hand.

Bobo had been the one to find her. He’d just stood there with his fur-covered shoulders slumped in total defeat, looking down like he was bearing witness to an unimaginable insult. “Did Wyatt snore?”

“He did,” Doc said. “Although, as I recall, it was not quite so...mighty a sound.” He walked around Wynonna’s arms so he could stoop low enough to pick up the gun. He didn’t have a good idea where to put it so he stuck the long barrel of it through his belt in the hopes that it would stay there. 

Doc had been _assuming_ that since they were eternally bound to one another, and because they had _agreed_ to align themselves with Wynonna’s cause that Bobo would have been in the sort of mood that allowed a man to be _helpful_. However, he showed no sign of moving to assist as Doc crouched low enough to get his hands under Wynonna’s arms. He hoisted her far enough off the ground that when he dragged her a step closer to her truck, only her legs were sliding through the snow. 

“We should think about this,” Bobo said without lifting a finger to help. He was stroking his chin like a philosopher chewing on a thought. “There’s three vehicles, and three bodies, and she isn’t waking up,” he pointed down at Wynonna as her heels caught on something beneath the snow. He stood there and did _nothing_ as Doc tried shaking her to loosen her heels. 

Bobo cocked an eyebrow up when Doc tried dragging her at an angle.

He hummed when Doc tried just _pulling_ and got nowhere at all but dropping Wynonna completely back into the snow. That was enough to wake up anyone, even if you were momentarily cursed by a witch, but Wynonna just groaned in her sleep and mumbled something that couldn’t be considered words.

Doc stood up and Bobo _smiled_ at him. A man could not be expected to be taken advantage of (such as he had been on the matters of the bones and the pouring of salt) without getting payback _eventually_. “And _what_ should we be thinking about?”

“Just, which vehicle to use to transport them back to wherever we are taking them. I suggest Dolls’ obnoxiously large truck. But he strikes me as the sort of uptight man who locks his doors for no reason. And I have yet to see his body.”

“Stop calling them bodies,” Doc snapped at him. He walked back around Wynonna to free her heels from where they were trapped before he went back around to grab her under the arms again. 

Maybe it was genuine thought that had decided on the black truck or maybe Bobo was just an asshole sometimes, but either way that was the vehicle the farthest away from where they were at the moment. It was a difficult but _manageable_ distance as long as Wynonna didn’t get caught on anything else. 

“What sort of mattress do you prefer?” Bobo asked. He had given up all pretenses in exchange for leaning against the front of Wynonna’s ugly truck. He was using the witch’s knife to trim his fingernails with the sort of precision that suggested he’d done something very similar before. “I’m more of a plush pillow top man, myself.”

“There is not,” Doc growled as he hauled Wynonna another three feet before he had to stop and catch his breath, “a single _plush_ thing about you. Except that damn coat.” He laid Wynonna back on the ground so he could yank on the door of Dolls’ truck and found it (as predicted) was _locked_. 

Bobo was smirking to himself.

“You have made your point,” Doc said. “I have been selfish and for that deplorable lack of manners, I am most _definitely_ sorry. However, if you do not help me find Dolls and get our allies into this truck, it will be a much colder and darker day in hell than this one before you get to _top_ anything again.”

The roof of the bar made a rattling kind of sound, like something metal was rolling across the slope. There was a long-slow slither of noise that followed it, and then a wet thump that was significantly muffled by the building itself. Bobo’s face was turning pink from all the laughter he was swallowing, but his tongue was making promises even before he pushed off the truck and threw the knife into the ground (for safe keeping). “Not even married for a week and you’re already holding me hostage with sex,” he said with a shake of his head.

“It’s an incentive,” Doc corrected.

Bobo strolled down to the end of the barn and made a show of rifling through Dolls’ pockets before he pulled the keys free and left Dolls laying face-down and ass-up in the snow. Bobo was very proud of himself as he pushed the button to unlock the doors. “I’ll get Waverly,” he said. As if lifting Waverly Earp out of the Jeep she was sleeping in would be half the work as dragging Dolls’ giant ass over to the truck and then figuring out how to get him _into_ it.

\--

There had been some debate, when they arrived outside of the diner, about whether or not it was safer or more dangerous to leave the car running. Doc had _finally_ cooled off from the excessively sweaty ordeal of lifting Dolls into the cargo area of his truck and rolling his various uncooperative limbs out of the way so the door could close; he was willing to admit that it was cold enough outside that not even the cover of the vehicle by itself was enough to stave off the chill. What he did not understand was how leaving it running with the heater on was _dangerous_ for the people still sleeping inside of it.

Bobo had been amused by his ignorance, but he hadn’t explained why it might be a bad idea. Instead he’d just left the motor running and the heat on and ‘cracked the window’. He made sure to say that it would be fine because they were outside. 

Since they were in agreement that the sleeping people in Dolls’ truck were all going to wake up safely, they saw no reason not to head inside the diner to eat.

While Bobo had been full of good humor outside of the barn, and that had sustained his smirking all the way to the diner, he seemed to settle into a little sullen ditch as he sipped his ice water with a grimace. Without the knife to busy his hands, his fingers drummed against the table top. He was balling up the same shred of white paper from the straw since they sat down and even now that he’d made it impossibly small, he kept rolling it between his thumb and forefinger.

“Should I cancel the honeymoon?” Doc asked. He could feel the curse constricting around them, growing narrow and brittle the longer Bobo stared unhappily into his water glass. “I believe it is too late for an annulment but I will understand if you would prefer to sleep in separate beds.”

“Shut up,” Bobo said, but it was all breath and fondness. He leaned back into his seat again, spread his arms across along the top and slouched so that his knees were kissing against Doc’s under the table. “I was just thinking how much Wyatt would hate to find out about this.”

“Which part?”

“Any of it? All of it. You banging his great great granddaughter? The curse being real? Us getting married by a witch? Is that what you’ve decided we can call it? Am I your _husband_ , Henry?” Every word hitched with amusement, until Bobo was smirking at how clever he found himself. It should have been _obnoxious_ and it was (a bit) except for how the curse went loose around them. Bobo could say whatever the hell he wanted but the fact remained that he was _at ease_ with Doc. He was _happy_ to be sitting there smirking at him. 

“As we have found ourselves bound together by a magic that cannot be broken by mortal means, I do not believe there is a more apt term for our predicament. However, if you call me your wife again I will be very displeased.” He might have said more but the food arrived. 

Bobo had ordered meatloaf and mashed potatoes and Doc had gotten a cheeseburger. There had been some minor discussion about how they were the same thing in different forms. No winner had been decided and the argument had been abandoned. 

The bell over the diner door gave a sharp twang of noise as the door was rudely and abruptly kicked open. Wynonna didn’t stomp but _drag_ herself over to the table. She was rubbing her shoulder like it hurt her (and it probably did) as she glared at them. Her hair had dried in outrageous knots that made it look like she’d only just gotten out of bed. “Where’s my fucking gun?” she demanded. 

But she didn’t wait long enough to get an answer. She waved her hand at Doc until he slid sideways and threw herself into the booth next to him. Since she had gobbled up all the space with her pointed elbows and bedhead, she must have seen no reason not to slide his plate over to the space in front of her. 

Bobo opened his mouth to voice his disapproval (no doubt), but Wynonna cut him off with one finger pointed at his face:

“I don’t want to hear anything from you. Not _one_ word. I _wasn’t_ asleep! I couldn’t move but I could hear. And I could kind of see. And I know that you did _nothing_. _Nothing!_ So I’m going to eat this cheeseburger and _you’re_ ,” she waved her finger at Doc, “going to give me my gun.”

“You were snoring,” Bobo said. He also took the precaution of pushing the red ketchup bottle across the table toward Wynonna. 

“I wasn’t asleep for _all of it_ ,” she amended. “I was definitely awake for the part where Doc hit my head against the roof of the truck _three_ ,” she glared at him, “times. And I was awake for all your sexual innuendos. Thanks for that nightmare fuel.” She grabbed the ketchup bottle and squeezed it in her fist so it screamed a great splurt onto her plate.

“Now wait a minute,” Doc started.

“Henry’s very attractive when you’re fucking him, actually. If you want to have nightmares, you should imagine Henry fucking Wyatt.” Bobo was very pleased with himself because Wynonna stopped frantically preparing her meal to glare at him. “Just like Brokeback, I bet.”

“Never,” Wynonna said calmly, “talk again.”

The door opened again and Waverly swept in, looking _irritated_ but not at all as angry as her sister. No, she stood next to the booth, looking back and forth between the two sides before she motioned at Wynonna. Wynonna started moving over heedless of the fact that there was barely any space left. Her hips knocked into Doc’s until he was pinned against the wall and Waverly was sitting primly on the end of the narrow bench. 

“So, I assume the witch is dead? Are you sure it’s safe to leave her body there unattended?” Waverly was half-asking and half flagging down a waitress to put in an order for a cup of tea and a soft drink for Wynonna. 

“I’ve got it taken care of,” Bobo said. He motioned at the door with a lazy finger, “is Marshal Dolls coming too?”

“Probably not,” Wynonna said with a fry in her mouth, “the way Doc threw him into the cargo area?”

Waverly nodded sadly. “It didn’t sound good. So,” she leaned forward so she could look at Doc, “did the witch say anything about the curse before you,” she made a stabbing motion with her hand that was no less incriminating.

“Apparently, it is now permanent,” Doc said.

“Because you killed her?”

“No,” Bobo said, “because we had sex.”

“Oh,” Waverly whispered. She was biting her lip as she looked back and forth between the two of them. “Well. Wynonna we should go and get the Jeep. We can’t just leave it sitting out in the cold all night by a barn? That would be cra-zy.”

“Yeah,” Wynonna said as she looked at him with what might have been meant as an apology but what was definitely almost an insult. She ate another fry while she waited for Waverly to get back up to her feet. “Well, see you guys,” Wynonna said as she pointed her fingers at them, “around...sometimes.”

Now that Doc had the space to actually breathe again, he pulled Peacemaker out of the back of his belt where he had been keeping it and handed it back over to Wynonna. “Do not consider this an invitation to shoot Bobo.”

“Not this time,” Wynonna agreed. She bent forward to grab another fry before Waverly hissed at her from the door to hurry up.

Most of the food was still on the plate. Doc was particular enough not to want the fries that were slathered in ketchup but he was fully willing to eat the burger that hadn’t even had a bite taken out of it. He set it on a napkin and pushed the plate toward the edge of the table. 

“You never said what kind of mattress you wanted,” Bobo said.

“That is because you are simply waiting for me to admit that I do not know enough about mattresses to be able to make a decision. As fun as it is for you to find new ways to remind me that I am lacking knowledge of this modern world, it does get somewhat tiring for me.” Doc waited a beat and then took a bite out of his burger.

Bobo snorted, “I’ll take you to a mattress store. I haven’t had a real bed since we built the trailer park. And, with all the sex I assume we’ll be having? We’re going to need something sturdy.”

Doc just rolled his eyes. Since there was nothing to dispute, he did not waste his time trying.


End file.
